Broke down palace. critique?

[Todd]

Hi Intricate B, welcome to the site!

A couple of opinions on your poem below:

First off, I'm afraid there wasn't a lot that worked for me. I think you can address those areas if you're inclined during revision.

The punctuation is very distracting. It gets in the way of the content.

Let's look at the first few lines to illustrate what I'm talking about. It's probably easier to see if I rewrite them in sentence form without the line breaks.

This brokedown palace; an unholy shrine, to house an un-attainable soul.

First, unattainable is just one word. The semicolon should be a comma. You probably need to remove the to before house and change it a bit so your sentence can have a verb.

I won't bring up punctuation again, except for a few apostrophe issues below.

This brokedown palace;
An unholy shrine,
To house an un-attainable soul.--I took this to mean the mortal body. Unattainable is a bit vague.
With every second passed,--you don't need passed
A foundation solid, shifts.--foundation solid, shifts is awkward, "solid foundation shifts perhaps, but really finding a better word that encompasses the idea of a solid foundation without any modifiers would be best.
The mortar crumbles.
The ceiling leaks and,
Time takes it's toll.--Takes its (apostrophe) toll is fairly cliche.

With the weight of stress
Among other things--Vague
The walls of this temple
Threaten collapse when confronted--You could condense "when confronted by" to "from".
By the slightest breeze.

The woodwork that defines
The shrine's frame,[b]--Describing the woodwork itself, or what makes it interesting would be a better choice
Creeks and moans in pain of--Line breaks on prepositions are not your friends.
Time's cruel, unrelenting lashings.--Cruel and unrelenting are too many modifiers. Try to capture what you mean in the image, not in adjectives.

The soul housed here
Becoming more and more restless--Becomes
Within it's confines,--again cut the apostrophe
Growing ever weary of--Break the line on a stronger word
It's shrinking prison,--apostrophe
Weeps rivers of tears,--cliche
In a yearning for release.--melodramatic

Intricate B

I hope some of this will be helpful, as you consider revision.

Best,

Todd