Nick, I try very hard to not react negatively to a comment but I have to say that I've long ago realized that when someone says the word "prose" in a comment it tells me that the commenter has a cripplingly narrow concept of what poetry is.
If you take a look at your revision you can see what I mean. It's a teachable moment. You've managed to take out all the rhythm and turned it into a discourse as flat as the most boring professor. Why is that not prose-like? Because the regularity of the lines looks more like a conventional poem on the page?
I'm not flattering my poem to say what I attempted by using line endings and internal rhymes as well as rhymes at the end of words, although they haven't plodded to the end of each line, alliteration, and pacing to make a poem far away from what I assume is being said when one says "prose."
I'll no doubt be called down and probably appropriately so for saying this but for years I've heard people say non-met poetry is prose and other stupid things. If someone is incapable of seeing rhythm and pacing and line dynamics, all of which are restrictions btw, outside of them being placed in a received order, that's something they could learn more by taking a look at much more than I can from doing anything similar to what you've done to this poem. (It's the same way I know when someone uses the word "pretentious" they are saying they don't understand something and aren't interested in trying to do so.)
Sorry that you're the recipient of my frustration but it is something to think about as you continue writing. I know it's your opinion, so it isn't necessary to defend what you said using that argument. (I honestly don't know why people say that as a defense. Just because it's my opinion doesn't make it valid. It was Hitler's opinion Jews were evil.) I'm simply saying your opinion misses most of what is in this poem and it would be helpful for you to see that.
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