Triptych Edit #1

[tectak]

Triptych

A “ten times ten”
study hall
    looks like
        a sushi den
  to cannibals

Academia = All you can eat

It’s all very pretty
sitting on the quad
eating a quadriceps
over a potbelly fire.

There’s really nothing exempt from cannibalism
if you think about it.

* * *

There’s a man with two wrenched hands
pulling lightning out of computers at his desk,
ten ten key keyboards lashed to his sled,
running a little joke store in a digital tidal wave.

* * *

a viper is heard

  two steps and
  a creak in the
  balls of the feet

      the hardwood floor bowing

ten by ten
splinter lattices
underneath
     
     as you both dance
      on the floor
      like vapor

---

There was some spatial work I did with this one, but I can't figure out how to include it on the forum which is a bummer. But I'm not too heartbroken that it doesn't show up and it looks fine without it so I'd like to workshop it as it appears.

-Edit: Hey what do you know! It didn't show up in the preview but it showed up when I submitted it. Wooo!

-Em

Hello ani,
It ill becomes me to say this but through ignorance I am completely unable to offer any comment on the cerebral virtue in this piece. I must leave that to others.
From a technical viewpoint, and accepting the expressed failings in the "spatial" parameter, I must again accept that I am not up to the task as it is difficult to  crit what is not there.
From a poetic platform, and I do feel elevated, there is nothing in the piece which gives me any pleasure. A complete right to freedom of expression often, as here, produces this sort of tangled, tortuous pros with absolutely no structure or context. Lack of punctuation, though permitted, only works when there is at least  some guidance through the jungle by say, meter or by grammatical exactitude...neither of which I see in this piece.
I ask myself "What is the writer seeing that I cannot see?" Then I think "Actually, I don't really give a damn, because that is what the poem should do"...but it doesn't.
In conclusion, and I apologise if this is more about my interface with this effort than about the "poem" itself, I have absolutely no idea what it is about. That is the great pity, because poetry should at least provoke a distillate of understanding, even if only because the reader feels a need to "see" what the writer sees. In this, the piece fails for me, and of greater tragedy, I really don't care. I do not think you do, either.(about whether I care, I mean)
Sorry. Even though "Triptych" raises the spacial element to a higher plane, without knowledge a priori of the subject matter I am left flummoxed.
Best,
tectak