Originally Posted by
Super Baby
I like its transparency. It feels very honest, and has your personality in it. A lot of poets try really hard to contrive a "voice" in their work. They do all sorts of corny e.e. cummings crap with punctuation, or try too hard to make it unique. They end up just distorting and contorting. This feels very close to life, not dressed up beyond recognition, which is actually a pretty huge feat. One of the most difficult, but more necessary things poets have trouble with, IME, is coming back home. Not hiding behind contrivance, but really just saying what wants to be said -- simply and honestly. I like "But maybe you can consider/ It might be me/ Putting the perfectly tinted glasses/ On your blue vision." <-- That says a lot about this relationship, which seems pretty complex and variegated, in just enough words. If you did want to turn this into a pop song, that would be a lyric that sticks out to me as saying much more than what's there.
I don't know if you wanted any critique or anything, but I'll offer some anyway, lol. It's a little prosaic, I think. I know that's part of the poem's voice -- it's conversational and low-key, which I like. But at a certain point, we lose the heart inside the poem to the conceit. It's like Michelangelo revealing the soul in the marble. One example of where I think you might be able to chip away a tiny bit is by removing the word "so." Especially the first instance at the very beginning. A lot of poems begin with "so." To me it comes across as noncommittal, like the poet is being willfully evasive to the reader or subject -- not quite willing to face it straight on. Sometimes this works and is appropriate (especially with a really painful subject like a betrayal or abuse or something), but often it just weakens the impact. You could even get rid of the whole first line and it would still work, and make for a bit more seamless transition into the next stanza: you're then jumping right into a face-to-face conversation with your girlfriend, instead of beginning on a sort of disclaimer or evading her gaze. "So" is in there four times. Only one of them is really necessary IMO ("So try to relax"). The poem reads much stronger without the other three, at least for me.
Now for my own disclaimer: My critique is based only on my impression of what the poem is trying to say. Obviously, you know better than I do where it wants to go. This might be exactly what you wanted it to look like. From Rilke: "Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsay able than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."