Breaking the Bough

[tectak]

Hello Each,
This is my first post on this forum.  I'm using the "Serious Critique" because although I have re-edited this piece a couple of times, there are still things I'm not quite happy with.  I'm hoping that a bit of workshopping will help me sort it out.  Thank you all in advance for anything you may say.  Mark.
Hi mark,
there are a couple of things which would improve this work immediately. Unless you are still using a John Bull printing set stop capitalising every line. You may still see the odd diehard trying to look like a 19th Century romantic but it is now pseudo-poetic and only confuses whatever punctuation you can spare.
Next. You rhyme. You rhyme almost obsessively but well enough. The trouble is you sacrifice fluidity on the altar of altruism...you rhyme to your own disadvantage and it shows.
Apart from that, the rest may be small nits. There is purpose in this piece, I can feel it when reading it out loud, but not clarity...at least not to me; but, hell, it's my crit.
Best,
tectak


Strange, strange day. "Strange" is one if those adjectives that modifies itself paradoxically..as in "it's a mad, mad world". One cannot be sure whether the repetition modifies itself (the paradox) or  is simply there to add gravitas to the descriptor. For me, it is the latter and would therefore benefit from more depth. It is a musing, after all, and so does not pretend to be a sentence. Keep the musing, by all means, though it does  not pin me to the page, but say something else about the day...at least more than it was strangely strange.
What need could there be,
To tear out your soul for scrutiny? This is difficult. You see, NEED is a reason.You want to say "What REASON could there be...?" but that would you trip your meter.  Find another way
Given free will but then given no choices,
The unified strains of a million voices
Ask, "reason or treason,
For which to let go,
The very last strand of the life that you know”? I have tried, but I can make no sense out of this line. It forms an imperfect question which confounds logic. Boolean. Ask" x or treason for which way to let go...?"  Huh? Drop the quotes and you get nearer but anthropomorphising Reason and Treason is still a metaphor too far. Nope. I don't get it...but it rhymes.
Tied to the quay of my still beating heart, Metaphors are like oysters...they only make sense if you swallow them whole. I don't swallow a quay and heart, less still a beating quay. I mean, this is your one chance per stanza NOT to rhyme, surely you are not going to mix  metaphors instead? Is it a quay? Is it an anchor? Is it a stone? Is it the truth? No? You'll never guess..it's a beating heart!
My anchor stone of truth.

Why shake me? why break me?
Why take me apart?
What truth could be put upon show?
That for this truth, you would die and desist?If you cannot make an unforced rhyme with insist, change insist. If you cannot make an unforced rhyme with desist, change desist. Resist, exist, enlist, persist, consist, scotch bloody  mist.... or just change both. Anything to avoid a Pythonic parrot sketch.Your poem.
We did it for you love, Aw, pet...how nice. Or should it be  "your"?
For you, they insist.
For you love, we just had to know. If not, it is too out-of-context vernacular and needs commas. Honestly, Love.

No smiles for that camera,
No lies for that crowd.
No up, no down, no quiet nor loud,
And doing their deeds the foul demons avowed
“The only way back is undone”! This is  by far the weakest stanza. That, that and their makes no movement in the piece and the forced rhyme is almost Shakesperian...or at least mock Tudor. Ayeee! I am undone! No to this.

Undo they did,
As my mind detached,
Watching the scene as their vile plots hatched.
I open my mouth, but I don't have my lips.
I don't have my eyes or my fingertips.
I can't feel my feet
Nor my breath expand. Lungs, surely, but the poem is now not so much ending as decaying so it is of little consequence. We have both forgotten where we are and if you thought I knew, well, I thought you knew. So we are lost.
I wander untethered through featureless land. Thought so, knew so. Always a good closing scene. If this is death then just remember that a few moments (hours, days, centuries, millenia) ago, you were watching with a detached mind through translocated eyes the hubble bubble, toil and trouble of vile plots hatching. You should have got outta here sooner.
Yet hidden, I keep in my still beating heart,
My fire stone of youth.

Suddenly, everything stops. Nursery verse. All of a sudden...and what follows continues in the same vein. Awful but only because you wrote better earlier...now see what you did. The reader has expectations. This is almost a regression...it isn't, is it? Yes, it is.
My all in a bubble that pops.
As I fall through the air,
The sky's ripping a tear
In my dreaming, and every limb flops. Oh, come along, now. This rhyming thing will be the death of us both. Unworthy.

Then No. It must sequentially be then....er, which is now...but then again. See next verse. We are now lost in time as well as space. Do you have the time, or did you. This needs looking at because tense shifts are irritating even when softened by progressive narrative. You do not have your eyes, will be I DID not have my eyes. OK, I DO get where this is going but you keep looping. We may have to induce.

Awakened, in puddles of mucus and blood
I lay, as the newly born child.
Wondering why and half drowned in the mud,
But feeling the call of the wild.

Slowly and haze filled,
The turn of the world
Is recalling me, back from the edge.
Sun rising, air chilled,
The future unfurled
In my beating heart, making its pledge.

It's come, I can feel it,
The day of my birth.
The day of the ever long searching for worth.
The day of new stepping upon this green earth,
And of touching a heart with my hand.

Why shake me? why break me? You have lots of spare capitals. Use them Whysely.
Why take me apart?
Well isn't it obvious now?
So that none in your world could deny you exist!
We did it for you love, I now hate this chummy familiarity with the opposite sex and expect others do, too. Pet.
For you wished this tryst.
For you love are breaking the bough.

The last Iine so damned predictable that I struggle to find another word to rhyme with "now". Maybe there is only one so bough it is.