NOVEMBER ’57 – MARCH ’80

[RiverNotch]

NOVEMBER ’57 – MARCH ’80

She has a cancer in her brain,
And it’s driving her insane Could be more, I dunno, poetic.
Slowly, day by day by day by day by day by day... she says… The earlier ellipsis should be a comma, and this is a bit repetitive on paper -- by the third day, we already get it. If this is just a transcription of song lyrics, well, the melody should be enough to sort out how many "days" we'll need to belt out; again, three should be enough.

She tells me that she’s dying:
She has this cancer in her mind Repeat. Sure, mind has a different connotation, but the positioning (and continuation) of this line does not make this either a good form of repetition, or an enlighteningly different point of view.
Which her doctors cannot find… And the position of the rhyme here is a bit odd -- AAB CDD -- never seen that before.

She has no eyes, no tears to weep: 
Her cancers run too deep- Cancer said three times, all in very not-so-poetical ways...no vivid imagery, no clear emotional transaction, no nuggets of intellectual stimulation...nothing.
She’s so tired, she cannot sleep…And at this point, with the abject lack of poesy outside rhyme, the poem becomes mere verse.

She told me she was dying:
She had this cancer in her mind
That her doctors could not find…

https://soundcloud.com/psyve/november-57-to-march-80
I won't listen to the song. I'm criticizing your words as a literary form, not a musical one (pig pen poetry, after all) -- might be that the music adds something to your words, but that's outside the scope of this forum, methinks. In general, the poem might work for a rather vague pop or blues or jam-based jazz or folk song, but other than that, it's too not-poetic to really work; as I noted earlier, I don't even think I should call this a poem, just a song, a collection of verse. 

Not that songs in general are just verse, though. Skipping Bob Dylan, half of whose works too closely with either pop or generalized folk conventions to be not-as-repetitive-as-they-could-be (but hey, the other half is really good poetry -- Like a Rolling Stone, I think, is up there), there are a lot of really poetical (as in, filled with vivid images, and with entertaining plays on words) songs that could be considered, on paper, as proper poems. Right now, the works I can think of are Schubert's Winterreise (and I think the songs there started out as paper-poems anyway), some of the wordier Hank Williams songs, some of the songs from Joni Mitchell's "high period" (that is, from Blue to Hejira, in my opinion) and some Bjork songs that, hehe, she didn't write all by herself (The Dull Flame of Desire, Sun in My Mouth, and Desired Constellation come to mind, all three of which are adaptations of paper poems into, well, songs). Oh, and the album shown by my current avatar (especially the fourth track, oh yes).