Fire Escape

[tectak]

Fire Escape

            We follow embers
            and bitter scrap metal,
            the fuel of our labors. Excellent opener with just enough mystique to carry through. As a single Iine, there is no great advantage to the concertina. I get the feeling that this may apply throughout. There are some extremely pensive, and worthy, thoughts expressed below. They have been sucessfully risen up from muttered musings in to fully erect towers of meaning...why chop them up again? Short lines tend to gallop along and whilst punctuation is often a tight rein, if you cede control to the horse, you or I may come a cropper. See stanza 3
 
            We restore God
            in a lifeless bronze design, "design" is a lossy word. It is just not quite the mot juste( you started it ). If you read the line without the modifiers you get the point. We restore God in a design? Hmmm.
            fearless, voiceless ambassador
            of Detroit under siege. A big yes to this. There are layers of meaning here. A happier linkage between the gasoline god  image and the Detroit allusion may mean that bronze would better be steel. Just a thought. This is up for workshopping? I guess bronze rings with a dull cliche. That is all
 
            Our vision suffers
            at these doorways in the desert:
            Artistic history, not ghetto graffiti
            Honest monoliths, not hollow hallways
            Stale tires, rotten sofas, bodies overgrown. If there is preachiness here it is made manifest by that old adage "Don't tell me what I think, or I will lie to you" Harrrrrumph. I may have made that up BUT the point is made. All these "we" and "our" lines become irritatingly presumptuous....and that is one hell of a definition of preachiness. On another point, why have you suddenly gone all faux-poetic with these retro line start capitals? If you think that chopped up lines can substitute for punctuation, well, you are wrong ; not least because it forces errors. Only a period requires a following capital letter. That's why exclamation marks and question marks have a period beneath them. Colons, commas and semicolons do not require a capital following. Nor do line starts in themselves. Nonethess, or in spite of this nit, there is, again, some great depth being plumbed here. Envy.
 
            Our ghosts reign
            over beaver-lined wrists and red-leathered fists,
            alleyway saxophones that mask oil’s marvelous stench
            those soaring ceilings of the true Central Station
            that quiet gateway, sentinel of the Strait, tiger in repose
            echoing “Libertà. Maison. Airgead.” If I have to google airgead I will but I am busy right now reading poetry. Your call.
 
            Stairsteps trace the side of our former titan Is stairsteps an Americanism and is titan tiny or Titan?
            zigzagging from sky to cement
            four dozen flights of feet pounding steel
            above the purgatory of radial roadways
            God-like hands bonded by guilt and grime
            are frightened at the collective fury
            of this city in rebirth. Too busy. Punctuate to clarity whilst I bugger off to look up airgead. That is what happens when you drop the reins. If you have relinquished control, who is steering this steed?
           
 

This is me liking it. There is a Son et Lumiere about the piece that is worth retaining in any edit. Don't take my comments too much to heart....no one else does...but work like this deserves a full metal jacket. I guess the main complaint is the classification of my thinking with your thinking and no one asked me first.
Best,
good stuff,
tectak
PS I knew airgead from the Scottish and could not  see it, so I googled it and found it was Irish... and could  not see it. So I don't see it. Help....and while you are about it maybe we can have an explanation of the linkage between a city in Antigua (I did not know this and google had difficulties), a French house and Irish silver. ( apart from the obvious, of course. That would never do)