The Trouble With Dying...

[tectak]

The trouble with dying,
kept under my pillow,
evaporates when light
through my window
cracks the broken neck shadows
on the wall,
and abstracts what I cannot abstract any more;
until, the trouble with dying
is no trouble at all.


[i had posted this here before, but as i have recently read a couple of poems about insomnia recently i thought i would repost in solidarity with my sleep deprived comrades - note, the only edits made to the original are the spelling 'any more' (rather than 'anymore') and 'kept' (instead of 'keeps'').]

Hi shem,
Shortform is not always a distillation of a complexity. Here, you are expressing a single thought. The debatable twisting of a succinct adage in the title does not really fit the mood of the piece...partly because the reader takes more from the opening line than from the absurd failure of the title to make sense. This is really where it falls down. We are all at the mercy of our central processing unit, and strive to understand in a "complete" way. I cannot connect the title to the poem nor can I make any headway (good word) with the opening syntax. The sentence structure is way off. It reads as though there is a line missing. Keeping a verb under your pillow is just overpoweringly nonsensical. Read it and weep.
To square the circle, shortform poetry has neither the time nor distance to explain itself if the words do not function in a coherent way...no matter that you may enjoy the tinkering of edgey meanings ( abstract an abstraction?) what matters, surely, is that you make your overall point. Which is?
Could be clearly condensed but for this crit, it is cloudy.
Best,
tectak