cheap love song

[RiverNotch]

From the fleece of the lamb of God was woven
The canvas on which was projected
The foot and the snake, a lone beam of light:
Christ and his demons invented.
           What do we see? that must not be spoken
But shown, even in imitation,
To brighten the minds of those who've yet will
And burn those who fall out of fashion.
          There is no deviant fails to inspire,
Nor heresy slouches unwitnessed.
The church with her chalice, her font, and her Jordan:
The rainbow, a vow contradicted.

          Dark Satanic Mills, sink me with possessives
and with kisses. Let good Christian hands be stamped
with the Number of the Beast. The beds where we snap
          pictures to share of our beloved pets:
I'll be the lion rubbing against your thighs,
you'll be the fleecy wolf outmatching my eyes.
          Like desert fowl or fiery cars, let's reel
above the waters of our shared delight
and heaven's hills be clouded by the gyre.

[churinga]

I have reservations about this. It is very preachy.
Using 'God' in a poem is fraught with problems. Ditto Christ.
It assumes the reader is a christian rather than simply a reader.

The opening is clumsy. You do not make canvas out of wool.
The poem has it's moments but also loses rhythm in places.
Try saying what you want to say without any biblical references
(which make the poem second-hand, as does using Blake).
Use your own words and thoughts and images.
That's just a suggestion of course, it's up to you

cheers

Ross

[Seraphim]

S1 just seems a rant against Christianity. The imagery is jumbled and doesn’t connect in any meaningful way. Liked the last line in S1, but nothing really leads up to it, nor does it provide any epiphany.

S2 makes no plausible sense whatsoever. What the “dark satanic mills” of England have to with anything that follows is beyond me. I’m guess it has some meaning to you, but you’re not conveying it to the reader.

[RiverNotch]

I've fallen back to my over-referential tendencies again, I agree. Though I'm not at the moment of a mind to revise this piece. Anyways, some responses:

--"Using God in a poem...", etc. Not necessarily. The Bible is so ingrained in English literature that, Christian or not, in a lot of ways one is expected to understand such references. Idioms alone: "fly in the ointment", "prodigal son", etc. It's not problematic in and of itself, especially when a poem such as this outright declares itself to be addressing Christian themes.
--The sinuous rhythm is somewhat intentional: for the first stanza, I opened myself up to occasionally working with just the accents, while the second stanza is meant to "fall into" IP. Of course, I wish I had applied those to something less confused and more original...
--...I especially agree with Seraph's point on how I fail to convey the significance of "...Mills".

Thanks for the feedback, you two. <3