Thought Market.

[Ryan_w_r]

On the trading floor of right and wrong, smooth brained ideologues plan their unscrupulous divestment of civility. 
Speculative swindlers, bet long on the parabolic bull run of subjectivity.
As a cacophony of unanswered margin calls ring loudly. 
Objective thought is shorted into capitulation.

[CRNDLSM]

I'm not really a vocabularist, I like big words and you use some nice sounding big words but there's also little words that don't fit with the bigs.  Like 'right and wrong' how about 'judgement' or a more specific bigger word.  'ring loudly' is a cacaphony I believe so why not something more concrete like 'hammer aggressively'. Thanks for sharing

[Tiger the Lion]

Hey Ryan. This reads almost more like a thesis than a poem. Nothing inherently wrong with that but the long lines and odd punctuation make the read more tedious than it needs to be. I would give each idea a little more room to breathe. Example below.

On the trading floor of right and wrong 
smooth brained ideologues plan 
their unscrupulous divestment of civility. 

Speculative swindlers bet long 
on the parabolic bull run of subjectivity
as a cacophony of unanswered margin calls ring loudly. "loudly" is dull adverb. Suggest reworking this line. It's the weak point of the poem.

Objective thought is shorted into capitulation.

I think I removed one comma and one period where I felt they were misplaced. For me the tight 4 lines made the piece read more wordy than it actually is.
Good Luck with it.

[Erthona]

Ryan,

I'm not sure the introduction of lissencephaly does anything more than make the metaphor more awkward to handle, plus it seems simply an evasive way to avoid using "retard", as it is used in a negative way that implies that, regardless of what word you use. This is not to say that the poem is not clever. However being clever seems the main thrust of the poem. Such as the second line,

"Speculative swindlers, bet long on the parabolic bull run of subjectivity."

why does "parabolic" need to preface "bull run"? A parabola does not actually describe anything connected to the overall metaphor, the same with "bet long", does that phrase convey anything more than saying: "Speculative swindlers, bet on a bull run of subjectivity."

I do like this line,

"Objective thought is shorted into capitulation."

as it continues the metaphor of floor trading, but does so in a terse, but thoughtful way.

However the last line seems the reverse of what it should be, "Ugly on the skin, lovely from within.. " i.e., lovely on the skin, ugly from within. Does not what you describe, describe an ugly person (within), a fake, false narcissistic individual? A wolf in sheep's clothing?

This is probably to long of a critique as this is basic (although probably not long enough for clarity), but I kind of got started and couldn't seem to stop. Still read as much as you deem appropriate (for basic) and disregard the rest.

best,

dale