The Wandering Dream to the Waking Man

[RiverNotch]

Many, many thanks for the feedback!

The Wandering Dream to the Waking Man
Hi river,
This is a long and meandering piece. By the law of averages cliches will pop up like air blisters under sellotape. Hard to squeeze them out. It could take some time so I will treat each stanza as an entity and return as often as I can.

(HAHAHA YOU DO NOT RETURN HERE -- YOU ARE STUCK HERE FOREVER!!!
But yeah, this will definitely take a lot of time to beat to perfection. 

And long and meandering? Perfect! I mean for this to be long and meandering, with the length echoing something epic (as well as containing a good deal of profundity -- though I feel my method here seems a bit, er, obscurantist?), and the meander[ingness] filling the thing with an oneiric quality (though I hope the vivid, and often obscene, visuals remove some of the boredom.

)

Goodbye, friend. Title? Informative if it is...blatant device if not I considered using this as the title earlier, but somehow I felt compelled to move it to status of the first hit. That said, you're right -- it does feel a bit hackneyed as the first line. I'll revert to my original intention, then.

We left the black wilderness behind, Statemental opening line. Probably deserves pensive promise of isolation. Semicolon methinks. Read on
the black wilderness with knife-branched trees, You will get away with this repetition but again  it IS a device. Beware of cynical crit. I had a dream. Meant more as a mnemonic device than anything (not that I plan to memorize this anytime soon -- well, I do, but that's beside the point) -- it develops the character of the poem as an ancient something being recited. That said, I'll still consider revising this -- I have a feeling I might have ended up overusing it.
with ash-covered soil, with springs of blood, You make the mortar stronger than the bricks...you build a very long wall. I would go for a period here, after blood
the black wilderness with ancient roads 
paved with the corpses of friends
and mortared with our tears and sweat; You have made yourself a problem here. You can start a new sentence but would need to rework " The black wilderness...." line. In any event, you NEVER start with a capital after a semicolon. I left that capital in for the sake of me still understanding what I was writing -- wrote this many different times, mostly with insomnia killing me softly (with its damn song). I might rework the line, too, for that sentence problem.
We left it for the clear waters of the Lethe, Oh dear...you know what I will say.Unrelated "it". "We left (it=the black wilderness for--)" I'd hoped the repetition before would have implied the same sort of repetition here, but whatever -- I'll still revise.
of memories lost and sorrows forgotten,
of eternal sanctuary, We left it for of memories? Yikes Oh dear. I'll rework these lines, too, just to show that these "ofs" are elaborations on the Lethe. With the reworking, though, I feel like I'll lose some of the volume, and since this already is a bit lacking in mass (I probably shouldn't expect people to know enough about the Lethe to really get it), I'll add a bit more thought into this.
for the little township rising
from the wet earth by its mouth, Might need to describe this, too, just to set the picture straight -- the poem's being recited in the township, as per "I leave you waiting at the docks"
and for a farewell: It says  nice things but you are listing. With,and,of,with,of,and....no to this. You are losing the benefit of precision Agreed on lack of precision, and necessity for something clearly pensive -- I'll strive to work all these details into a more substantial form, and perhaps be a bit more explicit on the elegiac quality of the poem, so that the later images hammer their points better, and the poem could be stuffed into a deeper context. I'll try and keep the repetition, though, at least until it (the repetition) has been determined to be overused (well, more overused than intended, anyway). 


(Woo! Time to work this baby with slightly less bias than before!)

Again, thanks! Before any starting any work, though, I'd like to see other pieces of feedback, and your continuation. And now that there's at least one response, I won't mind waiting as much. Again, thanks!