Please critique my poem?

Where is the poem?

It’s a little short.

@ArizonaPancakes: There are no words to describe…your missing poem! :)

yeah I guest that would help…hang on

thanks Astro your kindness is so kind.

no problem pancakes, your pancakes are so pancakey.

I like it. It’s nice, now that it’s been posted.

Very nice! p.s. I love Arizona

Well done, ArizonaPancakes. Great imagery.

King Arizona KIND OF works as a title, but I find that there’s a little too much subtle drama that obscures the simple beauty. Kind of like an Arizona tourism piece
I would lose the end from semicolon on….

I moved and the sun moved with me,
I laid down to sleep and the sun settled behind my head,
I dreamt that the sun turned into the moon,
the stars wrapped around me, lifted me.
they stretched out my arms and
carried me to the cold quiet desert.
whispering in my ear…

And remember that you want to write; “I lay down.” NIce.

’

Yes missed that typo

Why is it not “King of Arizona”? To call oneself a king of something has very different meaning from calling the thing itself a king.

I like your ending very much, but the semicolon should be a colon.

I’d also recommend a period at the end of the first and second lines. Is there a comma after “desert”? Looks like there should be. The punctuation in a poem should be impeccable and support the meaning, even if it is not the same as conventional sentence punctuation.

Since I live in Arizona, I’m surely not going to negatively criticize a nice piece of work such as this. I think it is quite a good poem (well worded and interesting) and made even better by the good suggestions offered by @gailcalled and @Jeruba.

King of Arizona

I moved and the sun moved with me.
I lay down to sleep and the sun settled behind my head.
I dreamt that the sun turned into the moon,
the stars wrapped around me, lifted me.
They stretched out my arms and
carried me to the cold quiet desert,
whispering in my ear: You are
the King of Arizona.

Lovely. Except that I don’t buy the cap after the colon. Lovely nonetheless. And still ArizonaPancakes’s own poem, just with the benefit of some delicate editing.

There you go, @AP. Show it proudly.

@Jeruba; What about quotation marks?

whispering in my ear, “You are the King of Az.”

No problem with that stylistically or grammatically, but it does not do the poem any favors. I would just take down the cap (it is whispering, after all) and leave everything else exactly as you have it.

If I were editing this for a collection, something I did do for a number of literary works only a few months ago, I would suggest exactly the changes you made, together with the l/c, and call it good.

In fact, this poem is better than probably half of the poems we did publish.

I like it. It made me smile.

@Jeruba: What’s l/c stand for?

lowercase

Sorry, @gail. Yup, lowercase.

Milo here: I knew that. Gail is an idiot sometimes.

Tch, @Milo. She speaks kindly of you. But I do know that if what you want most is unquestioning loyalty, you don’t get a cat.

Very nice. Definitely use the editing advice provided by Gail and Jeruba.

Except for the title.
I was thinking – Ode to AstroChuck.
But any variation of that would be fine.

@gailcalled
The problem is that last line is just so damn hokey..