This is remarkable. I'll be back to read again, but for now must just say-- good job.

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<salshep> <ordie>I should wite something awsome
<salshep> It's true
<ordie> You're write. That's my one-size-fits-all reort.

_{#Cabal. Because someone needs to be.}

Jim sounds frightening

The only part that I saw out of place:

'breaking the umbilical

is the initiation into life. A knife'

I understand what you're trying to do here...but I still think it would be better if you take out the "is."

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"All art is actually quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde

I agree with the guy above about the is being out of place. I also want to note that you use the word tangle twice in one stanza, and it doesn't seem to have any particularly useful effect.

First read I would have said this was prose with line breaks, but I see some subtle poetic technique that really breathes life into this piece, so I won't say that. Not at all. Its much more than just a story.

The pitbull adds so much.

Very interesting character, obviously. It seems like... he seems brutish, but he is possibly a metaphor for killing out our animal nature? Thats what it seems to me. So he's something that face-value looks really awful and detrimental, but he's there to help us and we can't ignore him because he'll break us into life and teach us how to live. Maybe he's part of what makes us look like a squirrel in a snare, but he's also the only thing that can set us free from that.

I don't know about the enjambment though. Its so verbatim that I almost feel like the ejambment is kinda...eh... :/

All things considered, this is the kind of nature poem I like. Keep it up.

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Harmonize your inward and your outward life, and you soul will know no bounds of joy.

I'd say mangled tarps and chords instead of tangled tarps and chord because it brings that pitbull into it... you know like a pitbull mangling something. That may completely fuck up your intended meaning but I think showing how the pitbull is kind of a concept like that would be beneficial to the poem

So yeah, changing the second "tangled" to "mangled"

but I'm also a free-rhyme intensive poet. You can see that in almost all of my poems from the last year or so, so I'm biased about that sort of thing.

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Harmonize your inward and your outward life, and you soul will know no bounds of joy.

What the hell its a terrier not a pitbull, my bad. Three comments!

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Harmonize your inward and your outward life, and you soul will know no bounds of joy.

hahaha no worries
thanks for your comments - edits pending

thanks also for the fave on this

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- the faith of wind, betrayed by the trust of birds -

I've already read the poem over several times, so I'm going to skip past the initial reaction of omgilovelovelovethis (xP) and go straight to the crit part.

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Somehow I feel like if you're going to repeat the 'Jim laughs like it’s a joke / he doesn’t get.' part, you should keep the breaks the same.. dunno. Also wasn't too fond of the squirrel breaks, so here's a suggestion --

The boy floated like a squirrel, snared,
and Jim laughed
like it was a joke he didn’t get.

or

The boy floated like a squirrel, snared,
and Jim laughed like it was a joke
he didn’t get.

And, in 'Says if we don’t help each other out, then / we’re just animals.', I think you could cut the 'then' (it just sticks out a bit, at the end of the line, and in poetry you _can_ take small liberties with grammar : P)

In one hand tugs a terrier
on a leash – missing fur, pink lesions, wet.

|
v

One hand tugs a terrier
on a leash – missing fur, pink lesions, wet.

(The 'in' is interesting, but it doesn't really.. make sense. I think.)

Once (age: 11)
the classmate turned blue, Jim slashed
the noose and brought him down to breathe–

The double 'the's bother me a tiny bit, but not terribly. Maybe try to work it out?

Lastly, you've got this almost-parallelism going with the timeframes (age:11), (age:40), etc, but the first one isn't presented this way. You might want to establish that early on, be consistent.

No other nits, really; this is a fantastic poem. I love alot of the breaks (and descriptions, as past comments have pointed to) - especially enjoyed 'Sucks in a mouthful of damp / smoke and flicks the cigarette at the dog'

(:

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| MIMESIS |

There's very little I can say to this.
It's one of the few times poetry has ever just sort of blown me away.

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MOTHAFUCKIN' BEES

Wow... very interesting, to say the least. Great job describing everything.

--
FACE!!!

Very slick and ingenious! I shuddered at the description of his dog and the cigarette butt.

My favorite poems are always the ones that say very little yet manage to say everything. Congrats on a very well deserved DD feature.

The only part that I had trouble with was the noose/shovel reference at the very beginning...I may be dense, but if he's trying to hang this guy, how is he also holding him down with a shovel?

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"Rainmaker here! How wet do you want it?" - Penelope Garcia, Criminal Minds

My other home: [link]