POETRY CRITIQUE

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You guys know how this goes. Post any poem you want to have critiqued. It is highly encouraged to attempt to critique as many other posts as you can before or after posting any work of your own. Though nothing can stop you from not critiquing any, more than likely if you post a poem without critiquing another yours will go ignored.
And remember, take everything said with a grain of salt.

I've got something bigger I'm working on, but I'm going to open this thread with a throwaway a wrote up about an hour ago just to get the ball rolling.

>Locked In

Here
Before this screen
Hard-wired Neat Clean.
Everything is crystal clear.
Housed by a tower
Plugged in for power
Transmitting inputs through a machine.
Display
Quartz-cut imagery
Raw and processed reality
Reckless finesse flung by the thumb
Mistakes, retakes
Three lives, you've died
Respawn, redrawn, reliving missed time
Missed phone call
A voice never heard
Mumbo-jumbo jargon
Whispered in the ears of the dead.
Informing whomever it may concern
News regarding the fall of their creator
Whose crash and nosedive has resulted in
A plummet and the meeting of their maker.
Echoing, quieting, stilling,
Settling softly into dead circuitry,
The last remaining updates lay filling
The unwanted and unchecked space of the free.

14.
Gulping down onion-ring sized
coffee stains on the page. Please,
allow me to take you in. All of you.
Hungry but unappetizing and displeased
with the results, isn’t it always?
Not this time. Dismiss it as
not the right fit but gas-powered
and earnest, it’ll show itself the right door.
Being your happy. When will I put
down the last of these lumps,
breastsized and nibbling gnawing
needing. Doughy is the boy who
identifies his delirium. Last supper
for two: want in? What poem
was written tight-fisted and tissueless
after a 5’-o-clock-gravy-train-dinner?

15.
Whitman, an American as good as any
of us, left poems in his wake
by the fistful. He sold them out
on country roads (39¢) to show
he could disregard and fly from
any love currently his. His tip hat
is overturned by bills and bullion and
tender so green you could bite its
worth, not, into a single tumbling crumb.

19b. Burnish/Tarnish

I leave loves to grow
plant them by gutters
rain waters their hearts
but gets on my shoes
the hill's not far away
suede insole is ruined
but binoculars
they still work they still
allow discretion for
me to see the seeds
from the tufty dew at
these heights the loves are
stalks now arraying
their buds to purview
my wet shoes the ones
that stepped with them in
rain water at birth
I see it in looks in
the lens in supine views
from my hill they want
me to come back (of
course!) how'd they not feel
it sooner I've been telling
them all along the
way in whispers that
don't even reach my own
ears my eyes see they're
already flowers that
neck toward my laying
it's grown clear from these
loves I've done nothing
but regard stomach down
their increase my shoes
damp still a new pair
needs be remedied
for the tall flowers
they now curl around
suede hooks insole deep
returned from gutter
abandon greeting me
my binoculars my
hill top and the inch
of grime and moss grown
on hems of suede shoes

you need to work on your line breaks dawg

It's cool, a pretty cool poem for sure. But break it up. Give it some stanzas. Often you can just look at a poem and see it needs readjusting, this is one of them.

Start off with breaking it into stanzas, I'd suggest one after machine, time, and maker

I actually meant to put (those exact) breaks in after I pasted it, rookie mistake. No coincidence that you suggested the exact right spaces. It should be:

Here
Before this screen
Hard-wired Neat Clean.
Everything is crystal clear.
Housed by a tower
Plugged in for power
Transmitting inputs through a machine.

Display
Quartz-cut imagery
Raw and processed reality
Reckless finesse flung by the thumb
Mistakes, retakes
Three lives, you've died
Respawn, redrawn, reliving missed time

Missed phone call
A voice never heard
Mumbo-jumbo jargon
Whispered in the ears of the dead.
Informing whomever it may concern
News regarding the fall of their creator
Whose crash and nosedive has resulted in
A plummet and the meeting of their maker.

Echoing, quieting, stilling,
Settling softly into dead circuitry,
The last remaining updates lay filling
The unwanted and unchecked space of the free.

Idk. I kind of didn't mind the Whitman poem. But the other ones just felt too disjointed. Too many line breaks. Not badly written, but badly presented in my opinion.

The ecstatic static failure I am
no more, I will move the earth myself or
move myself on the earth. A glob a gram
of sea shall move for me if not more
I am not miraculous--a small wonderous
wanderer. I know my faults I wear them as
worn shoelaces, worn belts. Nothing thunderous
no lightning tragedy, but a mortal mass
of simple lusts and loss. I try not
to trip or gain too much weight so
the faults in me are a lesser lot.
And I pray. Though I think
I must try harder to be a great
man, mortal, mote of dust. I fear to blink
to lose ounces of sand, to ingest fate.
This is a death (to count the grains,
and worry), still I do it. I must
love the world first as me. Yet it pains
me to love me first, because the scales thrust
against my favor. So be it. The battle always to
the strong, yes. But even loss is a venom that
tasted twice--thrice--loses bite. The organs accrue
immunity to rigged dice and marked cards at
games of chance. Take it all! Still am I.
I will live. My spine erect, let the blows come
I will sum all offence to a difference in my
life. I will kiss the lips of loss and draw from
her life. All life. All victory is cheap, to try
and to be rewarded? Let me roll the stone for its sake!
Let me labor to nothing, no one, no time, place, none. Let
me die for a futile cause, let me press palms to vapor. Make
me a martyr for false faith. Still am I. I will live.

Today I wrote nothing
Simply marks on a paper
Disappeared into the aether
Drawn into power
Useless tower
A gust in the breeze
Clicking of teeth
Today I wrote nothing
And nothing wrote me

This numbnut in the mess hall spreads syrup over his omelette.
Like, motherfucker, put your pancakes on another damn plate.
Are you some food connoisseur, the next Gordon Ramsey, bitch?
It's not even sightly. I can get around sriracha, ketchup can't pass.
Certainly Dr. Pepper for breakfast is not a champion's feast.
Now, about the syrup: would you like some hot gushing semen
All over your slanting stack of tasteless buns? You decide what
I mean by that: the pancakes or your cheeks wide abreast for two.
Only God and your sexually frustrated roommate know. If so, then I
Can get around your scrambled taste for eggs. The looks on you draw
The idea that you climbed out a rape van this morning: wrinkled
Polyester and freckled denim. Is it paint? Did you major in the arts?
I pity you more
As I drink and eat my poison.
In a rare, sunny evening I saunter the bridge, to and fro, for a smoke
As it is outright banned in the dorm. Nobody gives a kid's piss but I
Am too much a puss to bet on red. Daylight flickers, hides in a bed
Of clouds like a hyperactive child to an unfortunate foster couple
Caught earlier gnawing at one of those rubber dildos that look like
Gummy worms. You can't blame the boy, but still finger off the sun.
Today, leaning by the rail, pass a fleet of women, eights by truth.
Puff I do, puff do they. We're all in race but we all know I'm nearer.
The committee never said there was a prize for first, but I'm game.
Not a minute passes and she, this tempest-tossed stick of a virgin,
Weeping and limping her tired jog or slithers away, what was memorable
Of her vanity was that she was breathing from her fucking nose all
The time. Jesus Crucified Christ, use your fucking mouth. And Hell,
I'm a pro at it, do you see me snorting my cigarette? Keep on and
You'll end up like a Buscemi lovechild. Stop reading Cosmopolitan
Or whatever the hoot's on your pony pink nightstand, gain a gracious
ten or twenty pounds because, yikes, that ain't no woman's figure.
Oh, I pity you more
As I breathe and smoke my poison.

>I am not miraculous--a small wonderous
>wanderer.

This break, and several others like it in the poem, are just awkward. The phrases work better on one line, as a cohesive thought. I also recommend breaking it into stanzas where applicable, so the reader has chunks to digest in sequence, rather than the current ramble.

I would personally rewrite the first 11 lines as:

The ecstatic static failure I am no more,
I will move the earth myself- that failing-
I will move myself on the earth.
A glob a gram of sea shall move for me, if not more.
I am not miraculous--a small wonderous wanderer.
I know my faults— I wear them.
They are worn shoelaces, worn belts.
Nothing thunderous no lightning tragedy,
a mortal mass of simple lusts and loss.
I try not to trip or gain too much weight,
so the faults in me are a lesser lot.

That would be stanza 1, and the rest would be adjusted similarly.

- - -

My own stuff up for critique, the first two parts of a planned assembly of twelve.

I. MODOS
Grauhesch leers from his chamber, unbidden,
as we slink the shade of his view, unseen.
Grey king abed in his prison, unchained—
as our fear far stricter bids us silent.
That courtly mock: a wrinkled brow in thought,
repeated in bulbous and reaching flesh,
scornful wet facsimile of our own.
What hubris took hold and drove us here—
to cower before the insensate?
Long severed and silenced and bound but still,
the echo remains and shackles in turn.
Foul prophet those mouthless lines to lay,
not in mist and shadow but statute and stone.
What fault is this but ours, and ours alone?

II. What Befell
The Faceless rose, spoke, and so came forth this:
"There lies a land, near, past reach nonetheless,
where mournful peaks glance to ley below,
and roads no feet have tread nor builders kept,
to memory of page or scribe. Yet said,
’tis no empty land, though stirs naught within.
Scribes, it has, and carpenters, fathers and sons.
A King, it had, and courtiers, pipers and drums.
Tables, there are, set beneath still faces,
and no food, though untouched by wand’ring beast,
but mouldered and rotted to stain.
Those scribes, they hunch, over parchment gone to dust,
their hands stayed, in monument unwilling,
of those deepest crimes for greatest cause
wrought in vain, and none left to lament."

(unfinished)
My tattooed lungs are woven
My fingertips are shaven
Into the floorboards
Into the ashes
That my bones smoke to the sky

A plume of home
uninhabitable, yet
unmistakeably
a place of
Once

Crossed my heart
a Curse
Known what we didn’t know
about the Earth

The Earth that opens up to claim us
the Earth that purifies us of self
the Earth that takes our name and scatters the letters
the Earth that knows nothing

I like the second half, although power/tower seems like your efforts were honed primarily on finding a rhyme rather than meaning, unless I'm mistaken?