Red Tide Procession Edit

[just mercedes]

Hi - I like your poem and edit; it's great to see how small changes affect the work as a whole. My main suggestion is about the order of the stanzas - see what you think. I suggest it because, for me, coming where it does it breaks the feeling built up by involving the reader in the 'perfumed tides', because it is a bit prosaic, so I'm outside the poem again - yet the next stanza goes back to lyrical. But by starting with it, you introduce your poem and move ever deeper into the dream-like state from there.

Edit 1

A mattress is the closest
and furthest thing
from my dreams.

A week deep
I fill the bed;
drowning in its sheets
while summer slips
past the window, dragging
the sharp scent
of spoiled meat in its wake. I agree with cj about the suggested changes, although if you don't use them, you still need to fix the semi colon

I rise and fall with a Tide
perfumed blanket
draped around my form, 'draped in a Tide
perfumed blanket' sharpens this up
[like caterpillar slush
in a wind-caught cocoon.] This simile feels out of place, though the sounds are great. I think the sustained metaphor of ocean works well without it

a choir of steamships
roaming an otherwise quiet thought,
and myself,
evaporating into something whole. great strong ending.