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Greetings Miss Cheyenne,
This is a mysterious, unsettling poem to me. It makes me think of someone poisoning a person that she knows and watching intently as she dies. I'd imagine that the meaning is symbolic.
Anyway, if you'd really appreciate some advice, perhaps I could give you something that might help you out (I hope).
Rhyming is indeed limiting, but it's quite straightforward. (The wider your vocabulary, the easier rhyming is to incorporate into your poetry.) On the other hand, rhythm is much more complex. Your rhythm is quite consistent here, but you could probably improve it in a few places. I have no formal education when it comes to poetry, but I do have a few techniques of my own that can simplify the process of creating or refining a poem. When dealing with rhythm, I like to draw a visual representation of the poem ~ writing it as a series of stressed and unstressed syllables (because that's all rhythm really is). You could say that from a rhythm standpoint, such a diagram is a "skeleton" of the poem. For convenience, I use 1's to represent unstressed syllables and 2's to represent stressed syllables. For example:
You look green--------------------> 2 1 2
She said--------------------------> 1 2
All cold eyes and sunken cheeks----> 2 1 2 1 2 1 2
You look ill------------------------> 2 1 2
She said--------------------------> 1 2
With a painted smile---------------> 2 1 2 1 2
I'm fine---------------------------> 1 2
Said I-----------------------------> 1 2 *
My throat ablaze------------------> 1 2 1 2
I fell to the floor-------------------> 1 2 1 1 2 *
All arms and legs-------------------> 1 2 1 2
Tangled up like--------------------> 2 1 2 1
Balls of wool-----------------------> 2 1 2
You look sad-----------------------> 2 1 2
She said---------------------------> 1 2
And closed my eyes for me.---------> 1 2 1 2 1 2
There are a few things that you could do to "tighten" this poem up (depending on how obsessive/compulsive you are), but I'd make two recommendations to start with: Firstly, notice how the line "I fell to the floor" has two unstressed syllables in a row? ("to" and "the"; articles and prepositions are almost always unstressed by the way.) Eliminate an unstressed syllable to make it flow by perhaps adjusting the line to "I hit the floor" (1 2 1 2). If you read it out loud with the rest of the poem, it flows better. Secondly, though it's not a rhythm issue, the line "Said I" throws me off a bit. Since you repeat the line "She said", you might want to keep that form by changing "Said I" to "I said" unless you have a specific reason for the inconsistency. (The other things that you could potentially do to hone the rhythm have to do with the transitions between lines as well as the actual number of syllables in each line.)
Anyway, I hope that at least some of this is useful to you. As has been stated here, one becomes a better poet through practice. Over time, a poet's work can grow more and more sophisticated.
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