Entropy

[Truerenigma]

Entropy

Big scared eye, pink, dumb,
And unobtrusive as a broken clock.
I'm not certain if this is intentional or not, but this isn't a sentence. Even if you're using fragments as a device, it doesn't work very well here to open the poem. Once you hit clock you stop dead wondering were the verb is and go back to reread the sentence to try and figure it out. It's enough to keep a reader from going any farther. It's hard to get in to a poem if nothing's happening. And your first couple lines are where you want to let the reader in.
Shocked, I drop him as he tears my arm.
He thumps his way over to the corner and digs at the carpet, my brother’s rabbit, because You are doing something strange here, you have a fragment describing the rabbit, and then all these pronouns proceeding their antecedent, so the whole thing's flip flopped.
My brother’s come back home, numb.
Talks about how he talked to his wife today about the law,technically this sentence is incorrect too; it should be "he talks". But I kind of like the experimentation here. It has a nice conversational tone. I dunno. I am ambivalent. I love the assonance of "the law, of all."
Of all things. Puzzles over his accounts and slumps This is my favorite line break in the poem. The connotations here are so much larger then going to the kitchen. The enjambment allows you to allude to these connotations without being melodramatic. I also like "slumps his way to the kitchen. Great image. And it let's me know that we are still finding new ways to say and describe things, so it's okay to go one more day without stabbing an ice pick threw my eyeball.

His way into the kitchen for a beer. We don’t have any.We don't have any. Nice. A lot of implications here.
Once, when wolves would eat the sick, it was
A better world. Now we have guns,
Doctors, ammo, medicine, and entropy
Alone we trust to kill us,
Passively. This bit about the wolves etc. comes out of nowhere and interrupts the narrative. It is kind of strange, and detracts from the natural movement of the plot. I'm not sure how to fix it and I know you want something to tie to your ending. Maybe you could open with it. Or could the Narrator maybe see something on television about wolves to trigger the line of thought? I know that's a lot going on; brother,rabbit, t.v., but the speaker could be sitting there in the living room with the t.v. on.

I was cutting the hedge at noon today when I sawThis stanza is excellent, but maybe break this line on today
The slim end of a tail slide over brokenand this one on tail. Maybe even slide if you want to make things interesting
Holly leaves, drifting slowly,and on drifting
Poorly camouflaged. It was Christmas, and I thought,
It’s cold out. Snakes should all be under rocks,
Hidden. And I wondered what had woke him
And scared him from his hole, and I thought,maybe cut "and I thought".
Can a snake get cold? Can a snake feel lost?

My father saw it and took a hoe and chopped
Its neck. Or maybe it was some other snake.
I don’t know. They all look a lot the same.
He tried to toss it by the tail across
The fence, but it got caught in a tree, where it hangs.
I’m raking leaves when my brother finally pulls in. He looks a lot

Like normal, but I know. He’s not. My father grins
And hugs him around the neck, and a cop
Turns around in the cul-de-sac, and it seems
Like no one finds this place except on accident.
I take off my gloves, and in no time flat,
The heat goes out of them, and I

Sit down behind a pile of leaves
And pretend I’m somewhere else,
Where there is no help,
And therefore there is no need--
Where the wolves would have you long before the grief.

With some work shopping this could be a very nice piece. I like the main ideas in the narrative, and it paints an interesting story.

You could maybe cut the wolves bit out of the middle, which is a bit telly, and let the ending do the work on it's own. I'm actually on the fence about suggesting you cut the first two stanzas entirely, as the final four are the strongest, and when reading this I get the feeling that the poem is starting when I get to "I was cutting the hedge at noon today"... I think the of idea experimenting with passivity is interesting, but it's difficult to reconcile it to coherent reading, especially in the opening.


I'm going to read this a few more times tonight and tomorrow and come back with some more suggestions for cuts, breaks, and punctuation.

Thanks for posting. Welcome to Serious.