Stacks

[RiverNotch]

Stacks This piece feels all lost --- in a good way. Mostly finished --- just a few remain, for me. Mainly the punctuation, among other things, but the inconsistency there is consistent enough for me to deem a matter of style, bar a few small places, so I shan't focus on that.

Spines tear eventually,
with some difficulty.

But see the ease of the checkout boy
who whipcracks open a plastic bag.
[ five pence well spent ]
Save my wrist strength for ripping
through tomes.
 
Time to return home.
The flat is four minutes from the supermarket not
including a further minute for the lift and key
fob fumbling.
[ I save seconds every day forgoing my letterbox ]
 
Pace fast, glance at faces,
never higher, I warn you.
I have a protractor;
don't tilt to the seventh, eleventh, eightieth stories,
cricking the neck to look
to the vertex of that glass sarcophagus. To or at? Both are correct, but I prefer at.
 
The others, do they gaze up?
Do they weep and say:
mmm... skyscraper I love you! 
Only a true story if
you work in postcard design, crane rental I'm missing an Oxford comma here. 
or the manufacture of tuned mass dampers.
[ to soothe doomy office workers ]
 
Perhaps they gather at a set time; surround
the orb and pray. Those on lunch breaks turn to
face the building and blow sky kisses.
[ I'm being ridiculous ]
 
No matter,
just keep the cervical curve in check. A return to the cricking, I suppose.
Paving stones are always there to catch me.
 
Due to time constraints I have to take the lift;
a steel coffin suitable
for up to ten residents
to drown in together. These three lines feel out of place. A clean rhythm has developed throughout the poem, and breaking it two thirds in like this, with such (eventually rejected) consistency, sounds awful. Plus, the image is somehow dulled, with the skyscraper already being a sarcophagus. You could even compress these three lines, then connect the stanza to the next -- or perhaps not.

I have neighbours like a dog has fleas
like a teenager has spots
like a funeral has grief And with those last three lines concerning the lift, this last line concerning neighbors feels somewhat too sappy. Like a teenager has spots is grief enough, with the advantage of humor. And with the consistency of your punctuation, here feels like a mistake: comma after fleas, spots, period after grief (or just spots, if you follow my earlier suggestion).
 
Anyway, it's dinner time not simile time;
[ I must watch myself ] This parenthetic feels unnecessary -- as if the speaker's really trying to hammer in his self-conscious cleverness. "dinner time not simile time" is clear enough. Although you seem to building up parenthetics here, for the end -- better perhaps to just change, rather than remove.
I fold the bag, add it to the blossoming pile
[ a plastic totem ]
I microwave all the food which gives me
five minutes to tear pages from Wolfe. In a wry voice: lovely thought. In a post-satirical voice: what a waste, budding fascist! xD
 
I take the ingredients and place them in the centre of the page,
[ I whistle a wormy advertising jingle ]
fold the leaf carefully into a fat wonton
just the right size to be swallowed whole
[ I sometimes feel like a nested bird ]
the flavour's forgivable and
it goes down easy.
 
[ and steadies my undreamed sadness from blowing free ] An outburst of emotion that simultaneously feels out-of-place, the speaker doesn't seem to be grimy enough to have earned the right to go down this path, and appropriate, the poem's been building to a shout. Overall, lovely work.