Name Game

[RiverNotch]

Name Game - Just myself; listening to a bunch of hip hop albums lately, and this title reminds me too much of a Kanye West song.

1
Your name

staked in your brain 
like tracks of a railroad train. Railroad tracks. Trains run on tracks; they do not themselves have tracks. At least, that's what I know. And if the name was staked in a brain like tracks of a train, then that has the subtle implication of tracks being planted on a train, which, again, is wrong. Or rather, weird -- but nothing's meant to be so weird here.
 
If you had a different name,
would you be the same?
 
2
From birth you are staked with a name
hammering over your brain Is "hammering over" an actual usage? Shouldn't this be "hammered onto/into" or "hammering out"?
like thousands of rattling trains
chuffing out rhythms proclaimed, I don't think the inversion would be as problematic here if this piece didn't have other such problems.
 
This is your name!
This is your name!
This is your name!
 
Do names limit lives
as tracks limit destinations? For your consideration: Rails staked into the ground, names hammered onto the brain. Fine. But then the name becomes the train in this section's first stanza, and now the names themselves limit lives as tracks limit destinations, so the names as the tracks (and, with the brain being the natural stand in for a mind, the mind switching from earth to train) --- that's a lot of twisting.
 
Joe the plumber
pulls pipes in Pittsburgh. Agreed with an earlier point: sonically, this feels more like hammering. In fact, you could just remove these two lines (so as to have the playfulness in Bob the Builder stand out), then -----
Bob the builder 
hammers houses in Houston.
 
But where is Cletus the theorist? ---- fuse this and the following line. I think this might specify the speaker's culture (of mild condescension) too much for the poem's benefit. 

Should have named him Theodore. Note on earlier point: Theologist would have more intellectual meaning, but that shine I think would distract from the rest of this poem's much simpler tone. 
 
3
Imagine naming yourself.
 
Slower.
 
Imagine naming 
 
your 
Yeah, at this point the white space just annoys.
self
 
without the tracks
your name has rattled, And now again the name is a train? Good grief, make up your mind.
rattling you away.
 
Now, imagine 
your 
self 
unnamed.
 
These pseudonyms won’t last. This is unnecessary.

At first reading, I kinda liked this, but the more I dissected, the more I noticed inconsistencies, either in sound (which unraveled with the awkward constructions of the first stanza) or substance (unraveled when I realized how much you twisted around what "name" meant in relation to a train). Somehow, I think this would be a much better poem if you just ditched most of the train bits, and went with the meal of the last stanza:

"Imagine naming yourself.

Slower.

Imagine
naming

your self

without the tracks
your name has set.



Now imagine yourself
unnamed."

And note how I compressed all the "your/self"s -- I actually don't know what to make of them. The separation, conceptually, is right, emphasizing the self-connected nature of the names, but the separation annoys the heck out of me --- perhaps "your self", instead, just so you wouldn't have an unnecessarily extra line? In fact.....