[in_absentia]

Starlight falling from galaxy away
When at night they’re clear as day

Brilliant speck, dust of cloud
Shimmers lightly when allowed

The beaten path has gone astray
Trampled - erased, causing fray

The moment it hits, we’re petrified
That the fence is electrified

Hear the hum, it dares you so, to
Grip the wire and feel the flow

It stands to reason we’re better now
That we’re not forced to bow

But to forget that fence or path or star
Leads us all to bathe in horror

The horror of knowing that never again
Will that simplicity be so plain

As it was guided by complacency
So again, we’ll never see what we are told to be.

{I never seem to know how to handle punctuation in a poem... any recomendations?}

[kelpiewarrior]

Nice poem, if you could put a period or some kind of punctuation point at the end of each couplet, that would make it a bit better, but you don't have to, this is just my opinion.

[Vail]

Well.. let's see hear. This is a great effort, but it looks like you may have gotten a little lazy while you were writing this piece. Let me start off by saying, your first four couplets are relatively sound. I'm not a big fan of rhyming, but I understand that it does have it's place in poetry, and is used quite often. Still, the rhyming doesn't seem super forced in those first four, and even though your syllable count wavers, the flow is still there more or less.

In your fifth couplet, you should drop the 'to' at the end of your first line in that couplet. One, it disrupts your end rhyme pattern you have going. Two, it really is an unnecessary connector for the piece. It reads just fine without it. Sixth couplet, again a little off on the syllable count, nothing horrible though. Seventh couplet kind of train wrecks the piece a little. You try to force a near-rhyme into a piece that you've already established a full-rhyme rapport with. Would consider finding a word that full on rhymes with star.. my mind actually forced my eyes to read the word as 'whore-ar' to try and complete the rhyme. Your eighth couplet you reuse the word horror, another reason to get rid of it in your seventh. This time you don't have any sort of rhyme at the end of each line in the couplet. Would try and sort that out as well. Lastly, your ninth couplet, while you go back to rhyming, your syllable count in your last line is entirely too long. If you really want to fit all that you were trying to say, it'd be easier to just make a tenth couplet and round out the piece that way. If you don't mind making a few reductions you could shrink up that last line a bit and call it good.

The content of the poem is a little convoluted because you were trying to rhyme all the way through and had to make some word choices that may not have been entirely what you were looking for. After reading through a few times, it's easier to come to what I feel you were trying to put out there, but again this wasn't exactly clear-cut. I would call this a decent effort with vast room for improvement here. Thanks for sharing.