Harlequin

[tectak]

Sweat wet shirts steamI am not a hyphen-fan, but maybe between "sweat" and "wet"?
in late November sun.
Front rows, three by three
six pairs of eyes
unblinking in their enmity.Excellent stuff. And I don't watch Rugby
spine-jarring gruntLike to see capital letter, here. Not because it is correct but because you ARE using punctuation. Why pick and choose?
of shoulder on shoulder,
heads interlocking,
the rasp of stubble on cheek,
twinned stench of beer and body-odour,
nape of neck taking the strain,
the rutting upward heave,
sinews stretched,
discs compressed,
pain ignored, breath forced
from straining lungs.All the bricks are in place but held together by the ephemoral, transient comma. You could dramatise this stanza by lightly sectioning the observations. As it is, it it works...but it could work for me instead of against me. Even semi-colons considered.

Break break break!

Yes to this. The nits are hovering below the lip of sweet perfection like flies round a jam-jar. You could put the top on the jar.
Thanks for this.
Best,
tectak

Yes to the hyphen.

Don't understand the capital letter bit when the previous line ends with a comma.

Don't understand the last point at all.

Hello bloggs,
I got ahead if myself and changed the comma to a full stop after enmity...fell asleep...woke up and noticed the lack of capital letter after the full stop.
Regarding the comma storm. The last run of "points" reads breathlessly if read out loud. There is a tendency to dimish the functionality of the poor commas to simply suit the reader's oratorial interpretation. In other words, the use of the comma is dimished just because it is gratuitous. This may be deliberately liberating in the piece, but I like the poet to give me clear instructions...if only to let me disagree with some conviction
Best,
tectak