is this any good/is it too personal (a poem)

If you are wondering whether this poem has significant value as a piece of literature, it would be my painful duty to say no. It will never be chosen to appear in any anthology, including but not limited to Best New Poems of 2003.

It is determinedly personal, in that it hints and alludes to the emotions, the person and the events you seek to memorialize, but it witholds far too many telling details for the reader to share in any meaningful way in the importance of these emotions or events have for you. Which is probably for the best. This sort of poem can easily degenerate into a kiss-and-tell sort of embarassment that you have laudably managed to avoid.

For the purposes of literature, you would be far better off sublimating the significant emotions from this episode into a far more metaphoric form and working with that. It would free you from the decent reticence you feel in this case about writing a direct description of what you did and felt and then plastering it up in public. But that journey into metaphor has only just begun in this poem. It has a long way to go, yet. Only at the end of that journey will it be literature.

I hope this helped answer your questions. It is not much fun to be candid in these circumstances, but no one else stepped forward and I hated to leave you hanging there.