Hostage

[beautifulmess]

Time has taken you hostage
Shackled with seconds and bounded with days
Locked behind bars of deadlines
You meet every one as a way to stay safe
Your sentence depends on your briefcase
Somedays it's shorter, and somedays it's long
You don't care who you abandon
As long as you focus and get the work done

Memories have taken you hostage
You'll do anything to keep that home built
The home with the graves of your secrets
You bury the ugly, yet still carry guilt
You act as though you're so scared
With a gun held close to your head
And if you don't carry your wounds anymore
The gun will go off and all life will be dead

Love has taken you hostage
His power acts as tape on your mouth
You'd like to speak up but you fear the results
So you sit still and just wait it out
He screams then begs for forgiveness
He punches then calls out your name
It's never your fault, but it's always your fault
But he promises you he will change

We start with the best of intentions
We start with our plans all laid out
We map out the course and we build up the dream
Without ever having a doubt
But sometimes the best of us break
Sometimes things just fall apart
And we are too foolish to notice
When we destroy our own hearts

Life has taken us hostage
Success holds us down with such strength
Fame always makes us work harder
Praise is the one thing we need
Hope slips out of our fingers
And we are too numb to see
That the lives we're trying so hard to create
Are the lives that are making us bleed
 

[enemy anemone]

wow....I really like this one...

[Vlad!]

This is, as usual, an excellent poem. I am curious as to why stanza four didn't start with the "X has taken you hostage" pattern as the others did, though.

Additionally, you did a much better job being concise in this work. If you want to achieve even less wordiness, consider looking for words that have no meaning in themselves but just serve to connect bits of prose together. In poetry, these may be elided. For example:

His power acts as tape on your mouth
You'd like to speak up but you fear the results
So you sit still and just wait it out

The word acts in the first line, for example, is unnecessary, as is just in the third. The second you on the second line is also redundant.

However, this is still much more succinct. I don't know if you actually care about succinctness or not, but in this case you have achieved it.