Mind battle

[Erthona]

This is the second version of a recent poem I wrote called "Mind Battle", could you assist me in making it better?

Mind Battle

Consciousness, wondering, weaving, dodging in and out, (maybe flip "wondering, weaving", write it as "Consciousness wondering and weaving... )
Blank featureless faces staring back at me stop to stop, ("Blank featureless" more or less redundant)
Each and every time surreal, endearing looks fly,
Painful, hateful touches, the fifth sense I know,
Lone paving, the streets deserted, hesitating every other step,
The individual mind of feet and arms.
Down town battlegrounds, soldiers in the horizon, in the rise, (Downtown)
Fear like daylight nightmare,
By the mass’s, they come, they storm,
Running, four steps, two,
Shivering spines from left to right,
Two seconds, one.
Yesterday’s blink starts again, chemical hands taking me,
Towering skies, colossal,
Time stealing journeys, lucid,
Sand running through the fingers,
Steady ground lifting,
Elevating,
Chaos in bird’s eye,
Synthetic friends guiding through the clouds in my way, eagle to the left.
Ants becoming small, smaller, treading, feeling seems normal.


Recent abstract thoughts remembered, falling,
Grinding down metal bars,
Hemp wrapped,
Ends turning fire red,
Balanced throughout
it will only start again.

--------------------------------------------------------------
I decided to give up on a line by line. I think the problem is that what you are writing is clear to you, but due to grammatical problems and a host of unnecessary commas, it is not clear to the reader. For example what you wrote was

"Each and every time surreal, endearing looks fly"

What you meant was:

Surreal and endearing looks fly each and every time.

This is almost a sentence, but you are missing the "subject" of the sentence. The question is, "fly" from whom? If you don't answer that, then you are saying that "Surreal and endearing looks" literally "fly", in the same way you would say "Black and gray birds fly!" You mean to use it figuratively as in "disappear".

To pair it with the preceding line:

Blank featureless faces staring back at me stop to stop,
surreal and endearing looks fly each and every time.

If you were to add in "from" before stop to stop, and end the line with a colon, it would make the next line a comment on "blank". or "featureless" faces (I would choose one as they are too similar, and personally I would go with featureless for the alliteration). It would also be nice to add in a verb for the adjective "staring", as in "are staring". If we put it all together we have.

"Featureless faces are staring back at me from (bus?)stop to (bus)stop:
surreal and endearing looks fly (away) each and every time..."

To complete this , "away" after "fly", to get the meaning you want, as "surreal and endearing looks fly" means that people have surreal and endearing looks on their faces (personally, I'd probably use something like disappear, or evaporate, thus eliminating the need or the added adverb). Since you characterize these faces as "Featureless" the implication is that the "surreal and endearing looks" are no longer on the faces and thus have left.

As parenthetically noted above, I would define to which kind of "stops" you are referring as this helps ground the scene in reality a bit. It doesn't have to be bus stops, it could be stop signs, or whatever, the main thing is to not leave it open ended or else the mind of the reader will focus on that, trying in vain to create the scene. This of course takes away from the poem, something generally bet avoided.


You know it really pissed me off when I was younger to discover that poetry (which I had partially chosen because I thought I could avoid having to deal with grammar), had even more stringent requirements than prose...well that is if I wanted to be understood.

Anyway, if you're anything like me you will probably try to ignore this whole grammar/clarity problem for as long as you can. It is always a difficult idea to get that what we write doesn't convey what we think it does. I mean...it looks clear to me!


Dale