Babal

[RiverNotch]

This seems....unfair. Probably as unfair as I have been in a lot of my critiques, so I suppose it's more a sobering thought, than anything else.

I don't mean to say that I can't take negative feedback, just that this negative feedback doesn't really lead me anywhere. It should be obvious by now that the piece is heading in a direction you don't (and judging by your other pieces, perhaps wouldn't) like, and I really don't have the heart or mind to just discard. But if that were solely the case, then I should be getting at least a sense of who this piece (aside from "Kim") was really written for -- however, as the feedback stands, it really doesn't, and I think it's because, as I have noted, it's....unfair.

I have got to start with the opening paragraph. Immediately, you seem to assume that this was written to "spew up [my] intellect for an audience....[who] could not otherwise comprehend....[my] thoughts in plain prose". The question is, where does that assumption come from? As referential and confusing as this piece is, this wasn't written as a simple collection of thoughts -- otherwise, I'm pretty sure prose would have made everything far more comprehensible. It's a poem, and the method I assume most people follow when writing poems is mix thought, feeling, and that great spiritual othering that transcends the former two. The fact that there are some references that clearly don't inform the central conceit (say, all the talk of Philippines and colonialism) or even don't belong in any thought-corpus (the first and last stanza of section three; in earlier drafts, the whole of section three, considering it jumps off of a pop culture reference I don't think anyone got without having to read the now-eliminated footnotes) should have been a big red flag that, at the very least, the great error of the piece was that it was too personal, it reached in not to something vainglorious, but merely something vain. Which, of course, may still be a problem, but it's I think a problem across all forms of art anyway.

1. Mother Earth

-- Babylon stole her architects
from Egypt, her engineers from Greece, her doctors
and priests from Israel: that is why our tongues
are tied with Şibboleths. Truly, meat..........................what do you mean? Please do challenge
the reader, but when the reader is left shaking his or her head, you should rethink
the acceptable degree of opacity a reader is willing to swallow. Moving on, "what do you mean?" without presenting any actual guesses sort of enforces the thought that your first-paragraph assumption dominated the rest of your reading. This is only the first stanza -- not all poems have to be as direct as mainstream Hollywood in that they have to give up something concrete in the first bit (or even at all). Not that this is meant to be so abstract or opaque, but really, does "Babylon" or "Israel" or "Shibboleth" mean nothing to you?

is the sweetest sin, and Plato,
Plotinus, Valentinus, lied to us. They promised us
angels for wives, mortal gods for husbands, yet all we got
were grave old men, anxious Jocastas.   I don't recall Plato or the rest promising anything of the sort,
except in a neutral, cultural context.  Are you blaming them for something?  To add Jocastas here
seems ridiculous.  Your theme: meat as sin, seems pretty threadbare so far. This seems to be specific enough. I think perhaps you assume here a level of objectivity that again betrays how biased your reading seems to be. Usually, I consider confusing functions to be written with almost no mind, instead of the opposite; that is to say, for one, "I" am not the one saying this, and for another, the speaker isn't necessarily accepting "Plato, Plotinus, Valentinus" in the "neutral, cultural context" they usually mean for their works to be considered. As for Jocastas being ridiculous, well, the whole piece is ridiculous, and perhaps that's one point that set your mind against it; and for the threadbare theme, there really hasn't been any build up yet.

2. Grave Old Men

into a Spanish beard? Galleons sail
on pacific currents concretized
across Katipunan Avenue
between my Philippines and your Mexico...... O my gawd!  Stop it. Stop what? At this point, you haven't given nearly enough to establish the character of your critique, other than the whole "this is vainglorious confusion" thing, which I don't think makes sense when tied to this awkwardly-constructed, prosaic, threadbare section (whose revision I'm still very much working on).

3. Mexico

-- what a Şibboleth! Our old school's shattered stones
are now the home to snake-like trumpet vines, just as your English
is no longer the same as mine, and your Bible grows 
overshorn, incomplete. Truly, meat..............................why are you Telling so much? Show just a little. Now this is very problematic. This is the part where things are actually shown, so I really don't have any idea what you're saying here. I'd get this much more in the previous two sections, where most everything (I think the last two lines of the first section and the last stanza of the second section were fairly imaginative) has been "told". Or do you mean to say that you wish I were describing a whole moment, a whole scene, instead of presenting mere glimpses?

is the sweetest sin, so that when Lucifer
confused his craving for a love, he was cast down
to diabetic hell. The King and Queen of Corinth
were far from old when they raised me,.....diabetes and hell, and the Queen of Corinth - really? Again, what? Perhaps when you said "stop it", as in here, you mean "this is ridiculous", and to have been a bit more straightforward about that from the start would have been at the very least helpful, albeit it reveals more the character of the block of readers you belong to rather than the nature of the piece as it stands. So the piece is too mish-mashy and jam-packed to work for your block of readers -- fine, although I must say that limits your taste to too small a selection. Perhaps it's in the mode by which I mash-mished and packed the jam, if you don't really notice this sort of thing in its bedfellows, although so far you haven't given a clue as to what form you'd vast prefer.

Not that this section is particularly jam-packed. Nothing may be said directly -- which is sort of the whole thing of poetry, in my opinion -- but the dots are clearest here, especially if you take the stanza alone. "Meat is the sweetest sin." The next line implies what meat is -- confused his craving for a love? is the speaker talking about lust? "Lucifer", paragon of pride and evil. "was cast down / to diabetic hell", so Lucifer went and indulged himself in meat, and got a bit too much of that sugar. "The King and Queen of Corinth"....and if you noticed the whole "anxious Jocastas" thing of the first stanza, the point here should be incestuously (or at least sexually) clear. "were far from old when they raised me" would probably be the hang-up, as the thought behind it is tied to the messiest of the sections, but at this point the point should be enough.

Teiresias the sex-changing cataract no man
but child: Plato did speak truth
when he said fleshly woman is a child.
Dare I subscribe? You know how tragedy works:.............This is a tragedy of overstatement. The line (and I think I've established an undercurrent of evil enough in the whole thing to work, but that may just be me....then again, "Lucifer") or the stanza? Again, no clarity.

I am become an Indio Abelard,
grafted to cursed flesh, to shattered stone,
and you remain afloat, a child of God
a blinding angel, mute and genderless.....I feel like I am being lectured to by a
bookish drunk.  Can you really support these lines with any incisive logic? But here's the thing: why are you asking for any incisive logic? Again, we return to your prime assumption: that I was writing this to basically show how smart I am. If you're gonna ask for this support, at the very least show me that you're treating this not as a puzzle, but as a poem. The speaker may very well be a bookish drunk, but that doesn't make whatever he spouted purely for the mind -- I mean, "drunk"!

But logic? Sure. And the fact that these notes have to be notes, rather than an actual thing unto itself, I think enforces the fact that this whole mess isn't supposed to show my thoughts, or even "my" anything -- if it is me, then it's a me constructed for the sake of the poem (and this is a problem that I think seems to pervade my own critiques, although I think it's because I keep flitting between "you" and "the speaker" too liberally). My interpretation is this: that the speaker feels betrayed, betrayed by his own flesh, and the promise of transcending it in the living world as promised by the Neo-Platonists. He uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for this feeling -- as the makers were composed of many people under the guise of oneness, so too is he many persons under the guise of oneness. In the end, he envies his friend, this "Kim", for going above and beyond these personal divisions -- as he is a man who has to have a part of "cursed flesh", who has to be tied to the "shattered stone" of either his old school or the products of Babylon himself, she transcends the problem, remaining "afloat, a child of God / a blinding angel". And yet, at the same time, he despises her, for pretty much the same reason -- she finds her to be, in a sense, bland, "mute and genderless", with a language "no longer the same as mine" and with a connection to God that is "overshorn, incomplete". And thus, in the end, he develops a better sense of himself, or what created him -- all throughout, he hints at the events that made his flesh feel like a curse (and, to be clear, it's something clearly related to sex, and even perhaps incest -- then again, judging by the way he skirts around everywhere, the incest could just be some relatively minor, Freudian issue), and in the end, he....

4. Hermaphrodite

-- what a devilish love! It was no storm
but flesh-dissolving bile that broke
the Tower of Babel, that spread 
like pâté men across the earth.  O crap, sounds like we are screwed. ....achieves no real resolution. This is sort of a return to the same idealism of Plato, only framed as a sort of epiphany -- framed because, as I was writing this section, I genuinely thought I had found something, if not new, at least grand. Now I realize this part only seems new -- in truth, it's a circling back, and what really got to me was how strange yet clean the circling back was. So I guess what I mean to say is that, for this section, yeah, I get the confusion ---- and I share the readers' pain.

Although when you say "O crap, sounds like we are screwed.", I think you got something completely different, and judging by the tone of much of your crit, something you wouldn't have otherwise gotten if you took this more resolutely. Remember that the Tower of Babel broke long before anything happened, and the historical references peppered throughout the piece make it clear that the speaker exists a long, long time after the myth; when he says that men were spread like pate across the earth, he means men were scattered all throughout the planet in a method that to his twisted imagination fits with whatever he's trying to say, and not that we humans are about to mushed up and cooked with enzymes and shit.

Thus, in the end:
Not for me. Yeah, I dig that -- not everything's for me, either. The question is, how? why? and the way you read the piece, and whatever it is you wrote about it, gave me no real answers. Nevertheless, many, many thanks for the consideration: this is a tough piece either way, and without your feedback, my thoughts on it wouldn't have crystallized. I'm sticking with the direction I'm already going with, and the first two stanzas of the second section still suck balls. Again, many, many thanks.

[/quote]

[Sparkydashforth]

I must be brief RiverNotch,

the poem represented all that I deplore in such poetry.
An academic splurge of classical name dropping made to
disguise a paucity of any real ideas.
If my review was too terse, then I apologies to you,
and will state my reasons more fully in the future.

Best

Sparky D.

This seems....unfair. Probably as unfair as I have been in a lot of my critiques, so I suppose it's more a sobering thought, than anything else.

I don't mean to say that I can't take negative feedback, just that this negative feedback doesn't really lead me anywhere. It should be obvious by now that the piece is heading in a direction you don't (and judging by your other pieces, perhaps wouldn't) like, and I really don't have the heart or mind to just discard. But if that were solely the case, then I should be getting at least a sense of who this piece (aside from "Kim") was really written for -- however, as the feedback stands, it really doesn't, and I think it's because, as I have noted, it's....unfair.

I have got to start with the opening paragraph. Immediately, you seem to assume that this was written to "spew up [my] intellect for an audience....[who] could not otherwise comprehend....[my] thoughts in plain prose". The question is, where does that assumption come from? As referential and confusing as this piece is, this wasn't written as a simple collection of thoughts -- otherwise, I'm pretty sure prose would have made everything far more comprehensible. It's a poem, and the method I assume most people follow when writing poems is mix thought, feeling, and that great spiritual othering that transcends the former two. The fact that there are some references that clearly don't inform the central conceit (say, all the talk of Philippines and colonialism) or even don't belong in any thought-corpus (the first and last stanza of section three; in earlier drafts, the whole of section three, considering it jumps off of a pop culture reference I don't think anyone got without having to read the now-eliminated footnotes) should have been a big red flag that, at the very least, the great error of the piece was that it was too personal, it reached in not to something vainglorious, but merely something vain. Which, of course, may still be a problem, but it's I think a problem across all forms of art anyway.

1. Mother Earth

-- Babylon stole her architects
from Egypt, her engineers from Greece, her doctors
and priests from Israel: that is why our tongues
are tied with Şibboleths. Truly, meat..........................what do you mean? Please do challenge
the reader, but when the reader is left shaking his or her head, you should rethink
the acceptable degree of opacity a reader is willing to swallow. Moving on, "what do you mean?" without presenting any actual guesses sort of enforces the thought that your first-paragraph assumption dominated the rest of your reading. This is only the first stanza -- not all poems have to be as direct as mainstream Hollywood in that they have to give up something concrete in the first bit (or even at all). Not that this is meant to be so abstract or opaque, but really, does "Babylon" or "Israel" or "Shibboleth" mean nothing to you?

is the sweetest sin, and Plato,
Plotinus, Valentinus, lied to us. They promised us
angels for wives, mortal gods for husbands, yet all we got
were grave old men, anxious Jocastas.   I don't recall Plato or the rest promising anything of the sort,
except in a neutral, cultural context.  Are you blaming them for something?  To add Jocastas here
seems ridiculous.  Your theme: meat as sin, seems pretty threadbare so far. This seems to be specific enough. I think perhaps you assume here a level of objectivity that again betrays how biased your reading seems to be. Usually, I consider confusing functions to be written with almost no mind, instead of the opposite; that is to say, for one, "I" am not the one saying this, and for another, the speaker isn't necessarily accepting "Plato, Plotinus, Valentinus" in the "neutral, cultural context" they usually mean for their works to be considered. As for Jocastas being ridiculous, well, the whole piece is ridiculous, and perhaps that's one point that set your mind against it; and for the threadbare theme, there really hasn't been any build up yet.

2. Grave Old Men

into a Spanish beard? Galleons sail
on pacific currents concretized
across Katipunan Avenue
between my Philippines and your Mexico...... O my gawd!  Stop it. Stop what? At this point, you haven't given nearly enough to establish the character of your critique, other than the whole "this is vainglorious confusion" thing, which I don't think makes sense when tied to this awkwardly-constructed, prosaic, threadbare section (whose revision I'm still very much working on).

3. Mexico

-- what a Şibboleth! Our old school's shattered stones
are now the home to snake-like trumpet vines, just as your English
is no longer the same as mine, and your Bible grows 
overshorn, incomplete. Truly, meat..............................why are you Telling so much? Show just a little. Now this is very problematic. This is the part where things are actually shown, so I really don't have any idea what you're saying here. I'd get this much more in the previous two sections, where most everything (I think the last two lines of the first section and the last stanza of the second section were fairly imaginative) has been "told". Or do you mean to say that you wish I were describing a whole moment, a whole scene, instead of presenting mere glimpses?

is the sweetest sin, so that when Lucifer
confused his craving for a love, he was cast down
to diabetic hell. The King and Queen of Corinth
were far from old when they raised me,.....diabetes and hell, and the Queen of Corinth - really? Again, what? Perhaps when you said "stop it", as in here, you mean "this is ridiculous", and to have been a bit more straightforward about that from the start would have been at the very least helpful, albeit it reveals more the character of the block of readers you belong to rather than the nature of the piece as it stands. So the piece is too mish-mashy and jam-packed to work for your block of readers -- fine, although I must say that limits your taste to too small a selection. Perhaps it's in the mode by which I mash-mished and packed the jam, if you don't really notice this sort of thing in its bedfellows, although so far you haven't given a clue as to what form you'd vast prefer.

Not that this section is particularly jam-packed. Nothing may be said directly -- which is sort of the whole thing of poetry, in my opinion -- but the dots are clearest here, especially if you take the stanza alone. "Meat is the sweetest sin." The next line implies what meat is -- confused his craving for a love? is the speaker talking about lust? "Lucifer", paragon of pride and evil. "was cast down / to diabetic hell", so Lucifer went and indulged himself in meat, and got a bit too much of that sugar. "The King and Queen of Corinth"....and if you noticed the whole "anxious Jocastas" thing of the first stanza, the point here should be incestuously (or at least sexually) clear. "were far from old when they raised me" would probably be the hang-up, as the thought behind it is tied to the messiest of the sections, but at this point the point should be enough.

Teiresias the sex-changing cataract no man
but child: Plato did speak truth
when he said fleshly woman is a child.
Dare I subscribe? You know how tragedy works:.............This is a tragedy of overstatement. The line (and I think I've established an undercurrent of evil enough in the whole thing to work, but that may just be me....then again, "Lucifer") or the stanza? Again, no clarity.

I am become an Indio Abelard,
grafted to cursed flesh, to shattered stone,
and you remain afloat, a child of God
a blinding angel, mute and genderless.....I feel like I am being lectured to by a
bookish drunk.  Can you really support these lines with any incisive logic? But here's the thing: why are you asking for any incisive logic? Again, we return to your prime assumption: that I was writing this to basically show how smart I am. If you're gonna ask for this support, at the very least show me that you're treating this not as a puzzle, but as a poem. The speaker may very well be a bookish drunk, but that doesn't make whatever he spouted purely for the mind -- I mean, "drunk"!

But logic? Sure. And the fact that these notes have to be notes, rather than an actual thing unto itself, I think enforces the fact that this whole mess isn't supposed to show my thoughts, or even "my" anything -- if it is me, then it's a me constructed for the sake of the poem (and this is a problem that I think seems to pervade my own critiques, although I think it's because I keep flitting between "you" and "the speaker" too liberally). My interpretation is this: that the speaker feels betrayed, betrayed by his own flesh, and the promise of transcending it in the living world as promised by the Neo-Platonists. He uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for this feeling -- as the makers were composed of many people under the guise of oneness, so too is he many persons under the guise of oneness. In the end, he envies his friend, this "Kim", for going above and beyond these personal divisions -- as he is a man who has to have a part of "cursed flesh", who has to be tied to the "shattered stone" of either his old school or the products of Babylon himself, she transcends the problem, remaining "afloat, a child of God / a blinding angel". And yet, at the same time, he despises her, for pretty much the same reason -- she finds her to be, in a sense, bland, "mute and genderless", with a language "no longer the same as mine" and with a connection to God that is "overshorn, incomplete". And thus, in the end, he develops a better sense of himself, or what created him -- all throughout, he hints at the events that made his flesh feel like a curse (and, to be clear, it's something clearly related to sex, and even perhaps incest -- then again, judging by the way he skirts around everywhere, the incest could just be some relatively minor, Freudian issue), and in the end, he....

4. Hermaphrodite

-- what a devilish love! It was no storm
but flesh-dissolving bile that broke
the Tower of Babel, that spread 
like pâté men across the earth.  O crap, sounds like we are screwed. ....achieves no real resolution. This is sort of a return to the same idealism of Plato, only framed as a sort of epiphany -- framed because, as I was writing this section, I genuinely thought I had found something, if not new, at least grand. Now I realize this part only seems new -- in truth, it's a circling back, and what really got to me was how strange yet clean the circling back was. So I guess what I mean to say is that, for this section, yeah, I get the confusion ---- and I share the readers' pain.

Although when you say "O crap, sounds like we are screwed.", I think you got something completely different, and judging by the tone of much of your crit, something you wouldn't have otherwise gotten if you took this more resolutely. Remember that the Tower of Babel broke long before anything happened, and the historical references peppered throughout the piece make it clear that the speaker exists a long, long time after the myth; when he says that men were spread like pate across the earth, he means men were scattered all throughout the planet in a method that to his twisted imagination fits with whatever he's trying to say, and not that we humans are about to mushed up and cooked with enzymes and shit.

Thus, in the end:
Not for me. Yeah, I dig that -- not everything's for me, either. The question is, how? why? and the way you read the piece, and whatever it is you wrote about it, gave me no real answers. Nevertheless, many, many thanks for the consideration: this is a tough piece either way, and without your feedback, my thoughts on it wouldn't have crystallized. I'm sticking with the direction I'm already going with, and the first two stanzas of the second section still suck balls. Again, many, many thanks.

[/quote]

[Leanne]

Hi River,

I've been reading and following most of your changes but felt you were getting quite good enough guidance to workshop this; however, as there is a dearth of dense, high quality writing on the boards at the moment I thought I'd sink my teeth into this properly.  My first impression, reading the section titles, is that I'd find it interesting to see you continue a progression through mythological events as your base analogies -- it seemed like that's what you were doing, from the beginning (Mother Earth, then Men) but then you go and chuck in Mexico and it all goes awry   .  I was thinking, if you were to follow up with my perhaps too pretentiously intellectual notion, that Mexico could be Fire.  You already have Lucifer in there and a Prometheus reference wouldn't be entirely out of place (you can mix your mythology all you like, I like it better that way since it encourages me to draw parallels).  

Babal

for Kim

1. Mother Earth

-- Babylon stole her architects -- I must say, I'm not keen on the em-dashes to start sections -- stylistic differences, obviously, but why?
from Egypt, her engineers from Greece, her doctors
and priests from Israel: that is why our tongues
are tied with Şibboleths. Truly, meat

is the sweetest sin, and Plato,
Plotinus, Valentinus, lied to us. They promised us -- actually Plato kind of promised "women for duty, men for pleasure", but no matter...
angels for wives, mortal gods for husbands, yet all we got
were grave old men, anxious Jocastas. -- I'm not sure that anxious is the best adjective here.  Not that Jocasta didn't have good reason to be anxious, obviously -- but I feel this could benefit from something to set it apart from the run of the mill "rapist's wife who ends up shagging her son" kind of stereotype.  Prozacked Jocastas?

2. Grave Old Men

--my mother
and my father plagued me -- you don't need "my" here
when they raised me.
Or rather blessed,

how the knowledge of old age -- the "how" confuses this sentence -- I'd suggest a semi-colon after blessed, then straight into "the knowledge"
confused youth's understanding. 
Yet have I grown enough to shave 
this hircine curse's shape -- metamorphosis is a good symbol for youth, I like it

into a Spanish beard? Galleons sail
on pacific currents concretized -- I feel that you need Pacific unless you're suggesting that the currents are calm and that would be a bit bland
across Katipunan Avenue
between my Philippines and your Mexico. 

3. Mexico

-- what a Şibboleth! Our old school's shattered stones
are now the home to snake-like trumpet vines, just as your English -- you could try "snaking" instead of "snake-like"
is no longer the same as mine, and your Bible grows -- grows or becomes... I like grows to link to the vines, but I like becomes because of the alliteration and metric effect
overshorn, incomplete. Truly, meat -- nice use of rhyme to link

is the sweetest sin, so that when Lucifer
confused his craving for a love, he was cast down
to diabetic hell. The King and Queen of Corinth -- diabetic hell really throws me out of the mood of the piece -- it's far too trite (sugary, if you will)
were far from old when they raised me,

Teiresias the sex-changing cataract no man -- I think you're missing an opportunity to play up the unwelcome prophetic quality of Teiresias
but child: Plato did speak truth
when he said fleshly woman is a child. -- there are two uses of "child" so close together, and without a significant shift in the meaning or context -- this really doesn't work for me -- either build the contrast, or lose a child
Dare I subscribe? You know how tragedy works: -- again, Teiresias -- there would be no daring involved.  It would simply happen, surely?

I am become an Indio Abelard, -- enter adoration, but here it is one of intellect only, separated by distance, an internet love? Allusion to this most tragic of love stories really shifts the mood
grafted to cursed flesh, to shattered stone,
and you remain afloat, a child of God,
a blinding angel, mute and genderless. -- "genderless" is an interesting choice of terms considering the allusory Abelard's un-sexed condition, enforcing Heloise's chastity (well, that's the theory I suppose)

4. Hermaphrodite

-- what a devilish love! It was no storm
but flesh-dissolving bile that broke
the Tower of Babel, that spread 
like pâté men across the earth. -- the "hermaphrodite" can be taken either as a deception, or as a fusion.  I don't know which it is yet, but I'm leaning toward the deception.  I am concerned by the phrase "like pate men" because of the extreme ambiguity which lends nothing significant to the meaning that I can tell.  Are they "pate men" or are they "spread like pate"?  I feel that clarity is vital in this last stroke of your pen.

I wonder if you're also not missing a little bit of an opportunity, in your last section, to hark back to Plato's Symposium and the definitions of love?  Specifically the speech of Aristophanes, where he's talking about the double bodies and three sexes and all that.

[RiverNotch]

thanks for the feedback! some trims in the first post.

-- Babylon stole her architects -- I must say, I'm not keen on the em-dashes to start sections -- stylistic differences, obviously, but why?

basically to say the stuff's all quoted. i think i was reading Dubliners as i wrote this. plus, to bulk up some line lengths, and really, i love em dashes that much (insomuch as i used them to keep me from using em dashes anyplace else in the piece)

were grave old men, anxious Jocastas. -- I'm not sure that anxious is the best adjective here.  Not that Jocasta didn't have good reason to be anxious, obviously -- but I feel this could benefit from something to set it apart from the run of the mill "rapist's wife who ends up shagging her son" kind of stereotype.  Prozacked Jocastas?

gonna have to mull on this one. a fair point -- i suppose it's more a thing on my side that anxious stands out more.

and my father plagued me -- you don't need "my" here

trimmed.

how the knowledge of old age -- the "how" confuses this sentence -- I'd suggest a semi-colon after blessed, then straight into "the knowledge"

that may be the solution to my problem with these stanzas? or may be not -- i'll have to keep cooking.

on pacific currents concretized -- I feel that you need Pacific unless you're suggesting that the currents are calm and that would be a bit bland

woops.

are now the home to snake-like trumpet vines, just as your English -- you could try "snaking" instead of "snake-like"

perhaps, but i rather like the knuckly sound snake-like produces....

is no longer the same as mine, and your Bible grows -- grows or becomes... I like grows to link to the vines, but I like becomes because of the alliteration and metric effect

....sort of a compensation, perhaps, to not using becomes, with grows really being linked (in a loopy way, considering the next line) to vines.

to diabetic hell. -- diabetic hell really throws me out of the mood of the piece -- it's far too trite (sugary, if you will)

at this point, it's kinda key to what i read, so i'll have to keep it.

Teiresias the sex-changing cataract no man -- I think you're missing an opportunity to play up the unwelcome prophetic quality of Teiresias

agreed. that would be far more fun. i might move on from reconsidering the first two stanzas of the second section to the middle two stanzas of this one, because this feels a little too chimaera-like.

when he said fleshly woman is a child. -- there are two uses of "child" so close together, and without a significant shift in the meaning or context -- this really doesn't work for me -- either build the contrast, or lose a child

and so the chimaera-like. at least in the more obscure drafts, it was more consistent. 

I am become an Indio Abelard, -- enter adoration, but here it is one of intellect only, separated by distance, an internet love? Allusion to this most tragic of love stories really shifts the mood
grafted to cursed flesh, to shattered stone,
and you remain afloat, a child of God,
a blinding angel, mute and genderless. -- "genderless" is an interesting choice of terms considering the allusory Abelard's un-sexed condition, enforcing Heloise's chastity (well, that's the theory I suppose)

that's the play of it, at least in my mind.

like pâté men across the earth. -- the "hermaphrodite" can be taken either as a deception, or as a fusion.  I don't know which it is yet, but I'm leaning toward the deception.  I am concerned by the phrase "like pate men" because of the extreme ambiguity which lends nothing significant to the meaning that I can tell.  Are they "pate men" or are they "spread like pate"?  I feel that clarity is vital in this last stroke of your pen.

woops again! i didn't realize that pate men could be read as pate men, instead of spread like pate. really quite careless -- well, much of this was pretty careless (carefree!) anyway. i'll parenthesize, in the hopes of clarity.

although now i'm not sure if it reads as smoothly. i might just jump to another sort of expression, though with the images and ideas still there -- the point should remain to be that sort of deception/fusion, plus meat and towers and such.