A Tender Violence/It is. What is it?

[tectak]

Note: this is a spoken word poem. Please take this into consideration when critiquing.


A Tender Violence

It is.

Our lips lightly touch like whispers soft on the wings of a moth.It is a mixed metaphor....touch and whispers are in different rooms...and I have difficulty relating to a whisper on a wing. Sounds nice....but is it clarifying?
My fingernails trawl across your ribcage, rip tides in slow waves. Again, "rip tides in slow waves" is just this side of expressive until you realise that a "rip tide" itself is a misnomer....BUT....I can actually see where you get this "idea" from but would make one suggestion. Change it to "rip tides THROUGH slow waves".
I pull your bones apart to make home in your heart,
bathing in your hissing and your twisting and the way you keep insisting
my teeth on your shoulder, over and over. Very nice assonance but at the expense of sentence structure." ...and the way you keep insisting
my teeth on your shoulder..." Just how does one insist teeth?
I devour the prolific VerySpecific expression you render fine,
watching from just below your jawline,
the way you burn my skin off with your eyes;....and just how do you read VerySpecific out loud? See my end comments....and beware of the rap. It is not for everyone or everything.
surgically dissecting my disguise, your fingers pry through my insides
dyed in hues of green and blue
inspecting but never expecting perfection.
Affectionate articulation calls attention to fault lines
and salient doubtholes bound by silence but
every word of your prose stitches me closed,
unclothed and open to the world. In my weaker moments I confess to enjoying this kind of slash and burn style. I believe that you will make an excellent job of its oration. Once you use hard "attack" words, artiCulation, ATTENTION!, bound, stitches, unclothed (and its counter, clothed. Deliberate....yes, of course) you move on with relative ease, all behind you burned and smouldering. A long pause here, methinks.
Breathing deeply and weaving freely my soul,
unfolding control of the known and untold.
Within and without you I find myself whole
and wholly alone.

What is it?Never keen on rhetoric...especially in front of an audience. When in the play, the German asks "WHERE IS ANNE FRANK?" and an audience of panto-goers lilts "Sheeees in the AAAATIC!" , you can see my reticence....or is "What is it?" a title/header?

These moments unfurl from my fingertips like flags of surrender,
bending knees like young trees weighed under too far.
Memories free from my finger reeds as if each were lit cigars.
How the smoke fills the room, blooming in moon-flowers
asphyxiating my senses. Suffocating me senseless.
It's a tomb. For choking. And smoking. And hoping.
Hope may be a beacon but it is too a disease -Tentatively suggest commas before and after "too". Pedant you see
a pathogen wrapped within reveries and dreams
occupying your mind with complete incompletion and fear of deletion.For me, this is a dreadful line and I condemn it wholeheartedly as out of context both in terms chronological and spiritual. It is a sop to the -ion rhymers of the street. Not worthy of inclusion, dat's mah conclusion and mah resolution....yuk.
The rest, I feel, is another poem and I don't know how we got here from there...but I wish we hadn't
Instead of feeling healing, in head dread they fester
and I'm a repeat star offender.
It's cursed treasure obsession pleasure-
what you have is still gold but it cannot be handled.
Instead channeled, measured in hourglass sand.
Spend it slow and tend it with intended hands;
it cannot be infliction of conviction or addictive prediction.
Take moon-flowers in doses to ease the affliction
Quit rewinding the time, tune your mind to skysigns and
focus forward blind eyes 'til you finally
Arrive.

Hi,
please do not think me cynical but your comment "Note: this is a spoken word poem. Please take this into consideration when critiquing.", I find similar in effect to those driver's of cars with "Caution....Baby on Board" stickers on the back window. If you write spoken-word poetry (as all poetry should be) it is up to you to make sure that your intent, intonation, pauses and caesuras are at least seen to be intentional and at best seen to be to the IMPROVEMENT of the poetry. So please take this in to consideration when reading my in-text crit.
best,
tectak