Cuckoo Clocks

[UselessBlueprint]

Ahh, I love clocks. Unfortunately, this poem does not live up to what I had hoped for, being that it is focused on clocks. Notes in the lines, and afterwards.

Original:

The figurines in the cuckoo room
a mechanism to escape
the bane of all desperation is not being able to free them (bane of all desperation -- what?)
a half-covered-moon is only a quarter-of-a-night’s risks. (far too obscure. hyphens on half covered moon are unnecessary, but possibly justifiable on quarter-of-a-night's, somehow)
 
fists etched in wood; uncurled
battling stiffness and mechanical waves (waves in an odd choice for this piece. though it may draw a mild attention to sound / pressure waves, a sonic imitation would be much better here.)
nausea at the start of another twang at three (double 'at' bothers me. makes the lack of rhythm/meter in this obvious, especially for this line)
Pulled by strong movers; intricate gears.
Oh dance marionette, dance along with me.
Oh It was just me. (nitpick, but why capitalize Oh and It?)
 
stretching along the walls of the cubic room (I don't feel that cubic is explicitly necessary, but if it adds something you like, I see no reason it should be removed)
in black; a colorless dress,
spun out of energy on a half pirouette,
a slight scrape beneath the foot,
indeed tonight, not the best of nights out

This did not deliver for me. The progression was awkward. It's rather obscure for me, and probably has far too many extra words. But let me move on to what I really was hoping to see.
Clocks are rhythmic. They have to be. Even cuckoo clocks. This poem did not give me any sense of rhythm. Some lines are nearly painful to say aloud: my pattern of speech creates some very ugly elisions throughout this piece. For anything that deals with time, I like to keep to an iambic or trochaic meter. It's a cheap and dirty way to keep the clocks ticking as your piece progresses.