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Oh dark mistress I've been watching you.
In Black dress you walk by, I'm drawn to you.
A familiar emotion in your eyes I see.
You might not know it but you're just like me.
You're a glare on the darkest night.
Your pale skin reflects the moonlight.
Share with me your thoughts and dreams.
Tell me what do you think our life means.
Look at what you made me do;
I wrote a poem just for you.
So what's wrong with this poem?
You imply she is dark-skinned, but then call her pale
Black is unnecessarily capitalized, and there's an error in pluralization ("our life means" should be "our lives mean" or "your/my life means"). Both of those errors, however, could easily be covered by poetic license.
I like the imagery and the symbolic contrast of darkness and light. The last two lines kind of throw me off, though.
The darkest night wouldn't have moonlight
Dickenson used to capitalize certain words in her poems, so I don't think that's 'wrong'. I knew another author who always capitalized the word 'Cold' because it had a particular significance to him; it was practically a proper noun. And I don't think 'dark mistress' implies that her skin is dark. This is a poem, it could imply her emotions, behaviors, the way she talks, subject matter etc. Or maybe it just refers to the dress which is, afterall, black.
The only thing that kinda got to me was the yoda-ish syntax in some of your lines.. but maybe that's just me. :P
Nice poem.. it kinda made me want to see a picture of her.
I meant "life" as in existence.
I don't know why I capitalized "Black".
That's the second Yoda comment I've heard. I'm not a big fan of Star Wars and I don't know what he said.
Literature was my worst subject in school. :(
In that first post, I was just messing with you. But now for some more serious criticism. This line is a little awkward, but easily fixed:
"Tell me what do you think our life means."
vs
"Tell me what you think our life means."
The first would be a question in plain conversation "Tell me, what do you think our life means?", while the rest of the poem consists of declarative sentences.
Regarding the yoda-ness of the poem, I can see that you did it for the sake of rhyme. Yoda would often put object pronouns and adjectives before subjects and verbs in his speech. "Around the survivors a perimeter create!" is the example I thought of. Comparably, there's this line:
"A familiar emotion in your eyes I see."
It doesn't distract from the poem much (if at all), in my opinion.
Practical english wise? I'm sure other people have already pointed out grammar and puncuation errors. But overall, I feel like the poem really lacks.. anything. I mean, I understand you're talking about someone, but is there really any reason you call her "Dark mistress"? There's a whole lot of fillers, and the poem really lacks meaning.
The biggest thing for me is that there's no meter. I don't know if you intended it that way and just wanted to do a free-form poem, but it just looks like a poem that should be following a patern but isn't, especially since you have rhyming couplets. That sort of confusion makes it difficult to read smoothly, so I would advise that you either make the fact that it's free-form more obvious (extending some lines, shortening others; your choice, just enjoy it), or try to follow a pattern.
If I were to re-do the first four lines, here's how I would correct it:
Dark mistress, I've been watching you.
Clad in black, I'm drawn to you.
Your eyes' emotion I do see.
Though you know not, you're just like me.
It's hard to keep some of your full intent (ie. "familiar emotion") if you're sticking with a rhyming meter, but you can usually pull it off by creatively putting your words in a particular order or taking a few more lines to elaborate. If you want to move words around, but it messes up your rhyming scheme, try to think of new/different words to rhyme. Here's a link to where you can get help with rhyming words of varying syllables. (Just ignore the ads.) http://rhyme.poetry.com/