Night Terrors EDIT

[just mercedes]

Hi - I'm not sure what help I can be with this. For me the poem wanders too much, as if it's not brave enough to take a stand.

You posted it in Serious Workshopping, and I tried to read it seriously, and respond seriously. I think you need to work out more particulars that will anchor your reader in the scene - for example, names of medicine, colours of toothbrushes, anything that will differentiate your bathroom cabinet, your parent's bedroom, from every other in the world, and your narrator from every other unaware self-involved sleepwalker. For me, you don't include enough concrete images, and you do use too many abstract images such as death, memory, process. sense, death, process, sense, clarity etc.


Night Terrors

As a child

sleepwalking,
I’d rummage through
the bathroom cabinets, spilling
medicines and toothbrushes in the sink. 'rummage' for me implies purpose, which sleepwalking doesn't. I wanted the drugs to come back.

Some nights, I’d wake up screaming
pinned to the hallway wall
in my father’s bear arms.

“Wake up, son. Come on,” he’d shake strange enjambment - as if trying to hide the fact that this is prose with line breaks
me. “Kole!”

I’d eventually come back and sleep 'eventually' is very weak here
in my parent’s bedroom, darting up from time strange enjambment
to time, only to be held back down by my parents
on either side of me.very dramatic, but it doesn't feel true, I'm not trusting the narrator

Possessed behavior,

ever-present in my memory,
in these terrifying unremembered moments, ever-present, and unremembered - I think you have to make a choice here

there is a feeling. this is a very unimaginative phrase, flat, inactive, boring

I’ll never be sure what it is, this feeling. You have to make your reader want to know

I’ve tried remembering
the devil for decades. You're not sure, but now it's the devil?

My blood feels dense, thick, high
like I’m hurling across an ocean to splatter not sure how these two lines tie together
or careening from mountain peak to peak or be eaten check your context here
by an unnamed
closebehind.

Like death sits outside on the doorstep what is a like death?
and if I just stay inside . . . check use of ellipsis

I’m unsure of my earliest memory, unconnected to anything so far
but I have three antiques:
when mom broke the plate and spilt the beans,
my father stepping out of his truck with my first dog, as a reader I'm no longer interested

and my mother crying behind me.
I was eating lunch from the edge of a hospital bed. fragmentary, more confusion for your reader

My dad said once, “You probably don’t remember, 
but you almost died from pneumonia when you were a baby.” I'm at the point of - who cares?

I heard a monk speak on death as a slow process
of sense draining from you, followed by clarity. Context is lazy here

Might I have begun the process,
of sensory drain
and death as a child in the hospital? and if you did - so? There's no new message for me, your reader, yet

I see my parents’ deaths.  My fear
of losing them is the same that tore me from my bed
as a child.  My tears have not changed. I'm even more confused than you are.

The unnamed closebehind:
my birth and death
surrounding me. So - this is existentialism 101? Pre-existentialism?