Night Terrors EDIT

[RiverNotch]

Night Terrors -- Now here's a piece that kinda plufffuffed for me. Reads, as others before have noted, like broken prose. Also, I feel like I've read that title before....[actually, used: look it up on my control panel, if you want to stroke my ego!] 

As a child

sleepwalking,
I’d rummage through
the bathroom cabinets, spilling
medicines and toothbrushes in the sink.

Some nights, I’d wake up screaming
pinned to the hallway wall
in my father’s bear arms. Like, hairy arms, or strong arms? Either way, I like the image -- reminds me of the movie Brave.

“Wake up, son. Come on,” he’d shake
me. “Kole!” And here I thought "Kolemath" was just an internet name.

I’d eventually come back and sleep
in my parent’s bedroom, darting up from time
to time, only to be held back down by my parents
on either side of me.

Possessed behavior,
ever-present in my memory,
in these terrifying unremembered moments, 
there is a feeling. I've compressed the four lines for my convenience, since the stanza breaks don't really mean anything....and so far, neither does the sentence.

I’ll never be sure what it is, this feeling.

I’ve tried remembering
the devil for decades. I mean, it's an expression, but since it's a feeling when you're possessed, it's the wrong sort of expression -- easily invalidates the last sentence.

My blood feels dense, thick, high "Feels": so you're having the feeling now? In which case, DUDE, WAKE UP! And "blood feels high".....hmm.....with those medicines earlier, I have a good guess....
like I’m hurling across an ocean to splatter "Across an ocean to splatter" where? On one of the continents? Weird, weird image.
or careening from mountain peak to peak or be eaten Or being eaten.
by an unnamed
closebehind.

Like death sits outside on the doorstep
and if I just stay inside . . . Good image, but right now, it feels kinda unjustified. In fact, in general, it feels unjustified -- the sentences, bar those few misses I earlier noted, fit, but overall the glue that connects them doesn't feel, er, well-structured enough, like the whole poem is just a collection of senses that are just, well, there, not trying to make a point ------- which does work for some pieces, but then the second thing, that the glue isn't aromatic enough, that (perhaps because of the perceived [by the author] necessity of having such a toned down tone) the whole thing doesn't stick out as a whole enough to be worth the read, ya dig? I think for a less abstract explanation, the earlier crits suffice.

I’m unsure of my earliest memory,
but I have three antiques:
when mom broke the plate and spilt the beans, spilled, ye Brit! xD But really, with that paragraph-long notion, this jump just feels like a random dig to try to keep the audience interested.
my father stepping out of his truck with my first dog,

and my mother crying behind me. And the images themselves are honestly so generic (or generically presented) that they don't even work as standalone anecdotes.
I was eating lunch from the edge of a hospital bed.

My dad said once, “You probably don’t remember, 
but you almost died from pneumonia when you were a baby.” Another gem, although too dialogue-like to really work, especially in a poem that's already very prosey (even if the piece is corrected enough to not read like broken prose, what with the selected tone).

I heard a monk speak on death as a slow process
of sense draining from you, followed by clarity. And here is where the poem starts to move -- that is, from boring to heavy-handed. Leaving the poem on "almost died" would have been enough, I trust my fellow audience members to make the connection, but now this?

Might I have begun the process,
of sensory drain
and death as a child in the hospital?

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.

The unnamed closebehind:
my birth and death
surrounding me. So yeah, existentialism 101. Only, you know, not complex enough on either parts: on the part of the speaker, well, he got this all while dreaming! Who's to say that his night terrors weren't just, I dunno, hormonal, easily cured by some, what, anti-psychotics? thus making it an untenable, untenable line of thinking. And on the part of the audience, it's a topic that, in the clinical language of these last four stanzas, really should have gotten its own poem -- so far, it just reads incomplete. Really, if you'd just cut these last four stanzas, maybe add just a much, much slighter single-stanza conclusion, then that whole "existentialism 101" thing, though still (if you think about it hard enough) untenable, would at least read poetic, which is most important. That is, of course, if the images themselves were, well, not tighter, but more, I dunno, vivid? face-grabby? like, oneiric, but not like between dream-modes sort of oneiric? Something. The word escapes me.

I hope this all made sense. :S