Madge - version dos

[milo]

Hot! Oil seeps out of the asphalt road; you don't need 'asphalt' with oil. The double on 'hot oil' is nice.
cars make a sticky noise as they pass by, don't need 'by'
sounding like fat people sex on a hot night. sticky sound is enough, I read this ten times and never figured out why you introduced 'fat people sex' here. Such a big image on such an irrelevant detail. And the rest of the poem is free from fat people or sex(?)

At the bus stop is a woman with
overly-processed straw blond hair, 'straw blond' feels overly familiar, maybe because of the cliche "hair like straw" but I think overprocessed blond is probably enough

lipsticked lips like a freshly cut neon fig,
and deep crevices in pasty skin. It is occurring to me that you just like to over-modify the fuck out of everything. For me, it makes everything weaker.
It makes me think her name must be
something like “Madge”.

Her name must be something like Madge is enough, we know it is the narrator thinking

She has probably done a year
or two in the prison they call jail.
A jail without any of the
Mayberry RFD homey qualities
where the town drunk sleeps it off,
then lets himself out in the morning.

What is the point of all of the speculation about what kind of jail it was that she may have spent time in? Especially the description of the jail she /didn't/ stay in(?) This seems way too tangential.

She's obviously on the way to work,
wearing the ubiquitous medium-dark
brown knit knee length dress that serves
as the standard uniform

this is so much modification on 1 noun, I have to think you could pick better nouns and verbs or at least infer some of this stuff metaphorically.

for servitors in such places
as the occupational cleaning industry
and chain cafeterias where they
monotonously repeat their zombie phrases
“hep ya”, “moe tea”, and “cum’gin”.

"cum'gin' is amusing because it makes me think of 'cum gin' but I doubt that is the intent

Through the visual heat distortion
swirling up from earth as convection oven

this sentence just doesn't parse properly grammatically. I can figure out what you are trying to say, but every pass, the grammar here is annoying.

I can see her smoking a cigarette,
and I wonder how someone like her
can afford to smoke, when a pack cost
the equivalent two hours of work.
Well, I guess you find a way
when it is a matter of life and death!

©2013 -Erthona

It ends very prosey. Actually, the whole thing is quite prosey without the line breaks and the line breaks aren't anything to write home about (her, with (you actually broke on with?),way, they, places, medium-dark, and work).

The constant waffling (I think, I wonder, probably, obviously) all seems unnecessary and weak, and the overmodification throughout is cloying.

Thanks for posting.