From the subject matter:

I'll guess that the title comes from the Letter of St. James in the New Testament, and as such, the content of the piece is pretty much straightforward. I always appreciate that in poems. :)

The form's nicely straightforward, too, and I like the "slant rhymes" throughout--one of my favorite poems of all time, "Bagpipe Music" by Louis MacNeice, does this sort of thing, ending the lines with words that don't-quite-but-almost rhyme. That and the irregular syllable pattern serve the poem's message, too, with the difficulty of maintaining belief reflected in the difficulty of maintaining rhyme and rhythm.

If I wanted to get all "quibble pants," I could point out that the word should be "breathe" in the second line and that the period at the end of the second stanza doesn't belong there since it's not a complete sentence. But the poem says what it wants to say in a simple yet interesting way. Can't really ask much more of a poem, seems to me...

Mike

I like the rhyme scheme here:

But the rhythm's kind of lumpy. I'll suggest focusing more on arranging the stressed and unstressed syllables into a nice pattern than on simply counting the number of syllables per line.

As for the poem's content, I'm not quite sure what's happening, and there seems to be a lot of people involved for such a short poem: we have a "he" and a "her" as well as a "your", a direct address that to me also implies a narrator who's telling this poem to whoever the "you" is. Four characters, and I can't figure out what their relationships are to each other...

Mike

The versification is pretty and well-executed. An erudite interpretation of the theme, but lacking any concrete objects. Compare the effect against the pietist's rejoinder: "epistle of straw".

Lovely imagery:

But I'm not sure what it's in service to. There's unhappiness here, but that's about all I'm getting...

Mike

I don't know that it's intended this way, as there are all sorts of spectra in the world, but this one kind of says "gender identity" to me. The attitude about it is clear from the first stanza, and it doesn't really get developed any further. The structure is a tough one to use, though, and I know from experience how hard it is to mediate between the demands of telling a narrative and obeying what rhyme and rhythm constraints you've placed upon yourself. Maybe it would have helped to start with an outline and map out what piece of the story you wanted each stanza to tell?

The structure reminds me a little bit of a villanelle, but of course it isn't one. The rhyme scheme of ABABBCBC isn't one I recognize, but then you even one-up it by having the same A, B, and C in every stanza. I'm impressed by how it nails the structure, but it's very front-loaded in what story it tells.

Like Augie, I enjoy the imagery and language used, but I'm not following the thread of what it's about. The narrator seems absent-minded, where he starts talking about milk and brownies, and the note about childhood seems to say he's feeling wistful or nostalgic. But then we jump over to spaghetti, and I don't see the connecting thread. Then back to brownies again, just cementing the feel that it's a flighty thought process that's not trying to draw a thematic connection between the parts.

Hm, a rhyme scheme that uses the same A, B, C throughout, but alternates between ABC and CBA in each successive stanza. It took me a bit to catch on. The syllable count isn't consistent, nor is the stress pattern, so I'll assume you weren't trying to adhere to a meter.

I do like the narrative, about a dogged boxer who knows he just has to get up and fight again, no matter the result of each event, and how station in life doesn't provide an advantage to anyone.

I like the way the final line evokes "Charge of the Light Brigade" to me, but I don't know if that was the intent. Like the first poem I reviewed, this feels front-loaded by what sentiment it's expressing, then doesn't really develop it any more. The rhythm and rhyme are just a little off, and I feel like this is something that's supposed to sound more like song lyrics than a written poem. In music, there's more flexibility to hurry or stretch syllables as needed, and there's more going on to distract from words that don't quite rhyme, like "cease" (soft s) with "degrees" (hard s). But in a poem, there is no such distraction. There's just the words on the page, nothing more, so it becomes much more obvious when things are kluged a bit to fit the mold. Augie suggests that these imperfections play to the poem's message, and while I could buy that, it falls into the category that it's the less obvious interpretation. Take a story that has sentence fragments in it. The author's skill in other aspects of the story can convey to the reader that he knows what he's doing and these "mistakes" are intentional. Fragments can be an effective way of communicating things, after all. But if the story is riddled with what seem to be unintentional spelling errors, then the reader's just going to assume the author doesn't know what a complete sentence is. All that is to say that there's an art to doing something that's conventionally wrong and making it clear it's a stylistic decision, so if that was done in service to the theme, it might take lampshading it a bit by making an explicit reference to it.

I'll agree with >>Pascoite:

That more could done with the third stanza if, author, you're trying to say that the "philosophy" of the previous stanzas doesn't stand a chance when confronted by the real world, then maybe in the envoi at the end, you could tell us whether you'll stick to your guns or give in to the pressure.

By the way, Pasco, this is a ballade with the interlocking rhyme scheme and the stanzas all ending with the same line and such... :)

Mike