It isn't every day that I look through my poems and discover one I like and yet don't ever remember writing. That was, however, what happened this day, so here, without further ado, is the sonnet in question:
I look at you and I remember when
I wrote you poems; and you read them too.
They said what everyone already knew
But you were happy hearing it again.
I think I knew what I was doing then;
I wrote because I was in love with you.
I can't imagine what else I should do.
Sometimes I wish I were like other men
And not impulsive in the way I've been;
But then I think of what I used to write
And how it made you feel, and how we were.
It's times like that, I think, when I prefer
To be myself. I hope we can begin
To heal those wounds and make us both all right.
What Went Wrong:
I'm not a huge fan of rhyming homophones, much less having one such rhyme end a sonnet; but I did it here. I am not sure how "I can't imagine what else I should do" fits into the poem, other than as a vehicle for the rhyme. It would probably be better expressed as something like "And didn't know what else I ought to do," because that would avoid the following pitfalls it currently falls into: standing unattached to previous or following lines, having major stresses (particularly "should") fall on unstressed syllables (and the penultimate is a bad syllable to stress), and falling into the present tense when it should properly be in the past. The last problem is especially pointed because it is clear that in the present the narrator can imagine what else he should do, in that he has apparently stopped writing the poems. Putting the sentence into the past (with something like "didn't know") would solve this difficulty.
Not Too Shabby:
This is a poem that does not really reach for rhymes. The exceptions are above, but the awkwardness of the standalone line at seven has little to do with reaching for a rhyme and more to do with poor construction (I think the suggestion above would fix it) and the homophones are present precisely because the poem refuses to reach for any different rhyme than the one the sense presented, which happened to be homophonic. There is a difference between reaching for a rhyme (and thus twisting the sense, syntax, or both of the line) and picking a non-ideal rhyme that fits into the line, and this is the latter. I also like the flow of this poem. The initial quatrain hits one beat, the next three lines are another, then the next two, then the next five are all really one beat, although it could be divided into two and three. The rhythms of the ever-smaller groups followed by the larger, almost too-large, group seems to reflect, in my mind at least, how thought can follow small paths into ever smaller detail and then suddenly shoot up into a broader point, much as the poem does. Or if that's too highfalutin for you, which I think it might be for me, I find the flow attractive because it bridges the octave/sestet structure, allows enjambment between lines with different rhymes but does not break individual lines, and gives the poem a strong sense of narrative. Finally, I like the diction: the words are simple, they express meaning very straightforwardly, and they sound like someone might actually say them in the order presented. Yet the poem manages not to sound simplistic, because the rhythm, flow, and rhyme are all so strong.
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