Don't look at me like that!

So here's the thing.
I did it.
Yes, I did.
Don't look at me like that
Listen
I feel bad enough already.

I couldn't help it.
Well, I couldn't.
Not everyone has your
self-control.
Don't look at me like that!

I shouldn't have told you.
I should've let it be.
You'd never have known,
on your own.
Would you?

You only know
Because I told you.
Don't look at me like that!

I was honest.
I confessed.
Now you're looking at me like that!

Yes, I did it.
And I admitted it.
And I wish I hadn't.
I wish I could undo it.
Just don't look at me like that!

Sonali put down her pen and sighed. Would it work? She wasn't sure. Well, she had to try. She had to. Having got this far, she couldn't give up now. She re-read her poem. She didn't usually do free-verse. The cat-mat dog-log rhymes flowed much easier for her. Was this even a poem? She tried saving the item, but the site wouldn't let her. "Please correct this problem: Sub-type required." Poem? Story? Short story, she decided. Save and edit. It let her do that now.

So what was she trying to do, anyway, and should she tell the judges that, up front?

Yes, she would.

She was trying to experiment with a free-verse poem.

Get people all agog (she hoped, anyway) about WHAT this person had done, and then leave it hanging. Not say what the thing actually was. Tell the reader that it's up to the reader to decide what the thingie was, because let's face it, each of us has that one deep, dark secret that nobody knows and we don't know what the reaction will be if we do reveal it.

So, Sonali isn't going to solve the problem for the reader.

She's going to let herself off the hook by putting the reader on the hook.

You, dear reader, are going to put yourself there, and fit in your deep dark secret into Sonali's verse.

Sonali doesn't know how to tell you that within the line limit of forty lines, so she has decided this is going to be a short story, where she has the space of a thousand glorious words.

Sonali is using Cramp readers and judges as guinea pigs.

Does it work, the poem?

Does it work, to say 'put yourself in there, I won't tell you what the thingie was?'

Thank you.