zodiac23 Nov 2005

No. I'm a special education teacher in the middle of the Jordanian desert. But I did study poetry for about 7 years of college.

1) What you're lacking most is consistency to your metaphors. You often pick one aspect of an image that relates to the thing you're describing, but ignore the other aspects of it that don't relate at all. For instance, in a recent poem you called child prostitutes "painted masterpieces" when the only thing about masterpieces that resembles child prostitutes is something like "painted up to please the viewer"; all other aspects of masterpieces, like "product of hard work and creative genius, appealing on dozens of sublime and intellectual levels, painted by respectable people" totally work against what you're trying to get across about prostitutes.
A corollary of this, though not as necessary, is consistency between metaphors. For example, in this poem you have things compared to rivers and zombies like, two lines apart. It's not such a crime, but ideally there'd be some kind of logic or connection between them.

That's all I can do right now. I'll get back on the rest.