God can see

[Chaotic Body]

Between the moralizing tone, and the often obvious if not forced rhymes, I found this difficult to get through. I have rarely found finger pointing an effective means of getting a point across, or of changing someones mind.

"your mind's expression" a mind does not have an expression, it has a thought. A thought in turn may be expressed through a word or a gesture.

Overall, this seems to reek of an oversimplified worldview, which assigns simplistic motives to complex situation, and then condemns the actions of those involved. I generally try and stay away from commenting on content, but in this case the validity of the poem rest on the accuracy of the speaker's evaluation of observed, or at least hypothesized events, and as this leads to sweeping generalizations (some of which are not even clear) it undermines whatever validity the poem might otherwise have. It is much like shooting fish in a barrel. Regardless of the institution, whether religion, government, et al, it is always easy to find corruption, or to point out as hypocritical those areas where humans fail to meet ideals they supposedly champion.

Dale

Dale

Thanks, I appreciate that you've weighed in here

Unfortunately even if grasping at straws, I think these are the measures we have to take sometimes to try to express anger/angst and to figure out what the hell happened. I think I'm assuming too much that the reader is as open minded and warm to inspiration as I am.. that's probably very true! But where else would such thinking start? That's part of what's behind the poem, I think..

There is definitely no inherent problem with observing individual facts but it's not easy to suddenly start thinking like that so thanks for pointing this out- I tried to connect by painting a more coherent picture/narrative by using a consistent setting in v2

Really though, on the whole morality thing, in reality it's that absurd and I already do understand it shouldn't run clear in poetry so well so easily. Attribution that this poem is relying on is spread everywhere.. but that's never meant we lose an ability to communicate an idea. We use stories for this twisting of reality's details all the time; it's one of their key strengths.

I really want to be very clear on some of these points, in particular to stay objective but I don't want the poem's form to get in the way of that also! Particularly because I'm not so good at this. But what do you think, now, in particular about the version 2's S4?

Behind a powerful nation's pawns: i struggle to see how I got to this point, it sort of just appeared without any lead up or substance. it needs some kind of progression.

Thanks for your detailed input again!! It's great

How would I add progression? I tried rearranging it a little; I hope the jump to "On the TV" is much easier

I'm really struggling with this but I think I can pull out stronger imagery (v2 is better with this?), I hope that will be enough. Otherwise there's going to be a lot of time before I can make this much better.