Primal

[jdvanwijk]

Thanks for your feedback, very useful! About the second verse, what you guessed at was correct: just before the scream, the narrator thinks about his neighbours and for the moment he hates them for being there. It sets up a train of thought with the narrator that he feels confined by modern society in general in his "will to scream" (which could of course stand for many other things...) and that there is no escaping it. (This whole part needs some work I think...) Would you have any advice how to make this clearer in the poem?

All best!
Jan

PS Aliens??

Sunday morning after breakfast,
it came to me like Jesus
from the cave: I must scream,

I don't think the comma is needed here, there's no list of cries or screams to follow, just a description of a singular cry, not even a list of descriptors for the cry. "I must scream a cry to rival my ancestors' "... works fine, so I'm left to wonder if you meant something else: Is the cry not the scream? {I must scream.(there is/I heard) a cry...} hmm.

a cry to rival my dear ancestors
clubbing their dinner to death.

I like clubbing their dinner to death. It is an interesting way to show that the narrators is speaking from current times, and gives us an idea of which ancestors he's referring to: not the past couple generations, not those who migrated from the homeland 200 years ago, etc.. But why couldn't they be aliens? That would be interesting.



I took a deep breath;
that's when my brain kicked in.

I have to say I don't really like "brain kicked in" line; you could say the same thing with a great start-up metaphor, also what exactly are you trying to say here? Did you mean that the narrator was going to scream, and took in a deep breath in preparation for the scream, but decided not to after thinking about it?

Neighbours are a dreadful thing
when you're suffering from revelation,
especially when they sleep late.

This stanza seems out-of-the-blue, random. And why are neighbors a dreadful thing? Did the narrator wake them with the scream? I thought his brain kicked in and he thought the better of it? And why does that make them dreadful? Perhaps he can't scream because he doesn't want to wake them, but this is unclear.

Outside - the houses, the streets,
the cars, the parks,
the hedges, the lights:
on every horizon a guard
chaining us to modern times.

So it's only the things outside than chain us to modern times? Also, how is horizon better than on every corner? Have we suddenly gone sailing?

I really like the ideas here. Minimal editing required, it just needs some tinkering.