My first thought is that your sentences are basically all simple past formulations with a bunch of adjective or noun phrases added, something like the sentence "The snake, sensuous and sinuous, slipping its tongue on stones, slid silently seesawing its spine in the sage to scout out supper" is really just "The snake slid."

But I don't think that's the case, really. For one, the first sentence in this poem doesn't even meet that description. Actually, it's not even a sentence. I would take a look at verb tenses, though, for starters. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen anything other than simple-past and present-participle. Sorry I can't be more help. I've been Arak today, which in addition to be a tasty licorice-flavored liquor is also the Arabic word for "sweat."

My suggestions:

1) Punctuate.
2) Stop writing all of your sentences the same, and making them all like "Beside painted siding abandoned homes melt and slough to statues etc, etc, etc." I'm at a loss to explain exactly how simplistic and yet totally unnatural your sentence structures are, and how there are a lot better ones. You're just going to say, "But my sentences have so many words! So many subordinate clauses!"
3) Include similes. People like similes. Really, modern poetry's like 1 simile or metaphor per 2 lines.

That's about it. You're as always perfectly entitled to tell me to bug off.

That's exactly what I'm saying. The point of the poem isn't that he can look at the bitterness, complaininess, and critical side of himself and change it (ie, avoid, in your words, "falling into a trap".) The point of your poem, whether you mean it or not, is that the bitterness, etc, IS his core and therefore unavoidable.

That's why I ask, how does one avoid one's "core"? Maybe it would be better to ask, Can one change one's "core"? And if he can, it's not much of a core, is it?

All this is kind of moot for me; I don't believe in cores. And I don't think you mean it the way I'm reading it. But I think that's why everyone's pissed about this one. I think they read it the same way.

I try to make each of my contemplation poems contain a penis or the word 'fucking'. What are my chances?

How - or how long, or how successfully - can one avoid one's "core"?

Yes, more often that not, surely. You end up throwing a lot of poems (or rhymes) away, but what you end up keeping is worth it. At least, as far as poetry in general is worth it.

Don't reject half-rhyme. Most sonnet-writers today (and there are more, and better, than you think) are writing half-rhymes. For my money, the best half-rhyme I've read recently is Pinsky's Inferno. Which is also half-pentameter, and sounds just like real Italian terza rima.

Nevertheless, except for "watching" the words above are one-hundred-percent rhymes. The poem itself (partly half-rhymed, I admit,) is here: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=94353

I just read a pretty well-received contemporary (ie, published last year) poem with love/above rhymed. It's not impossible, but I'd say if you stick with well-known rhymes, you're almost sure to write the same poems as everybody else's. If you start out with, say, "bipolar" at the end of a line and can make it work, you've got a chance at doing something that hasn't been done yet.

re: "but unless you have actually cut yourself, you have no place telling me or anyone else how such things "Should" be addressed."

I disagree. Care to tussle?

I've never heard that definition of surrealism. It strikes me as kind of a misunderstanding on Thomas' part. Anyway, surely most surrealists would have agreed with his idea - that there is a mediating influence. As in the most famous surrealist exercise, the Exquisite Corpse, you always have at least of bit of line showing to guide you. For another example, Lewis Carroll didn't completely randomize his word coinage in "Jabberwocky", he just made up a consistent language that didn't make any sense. If brillig, slithy troves, wabe, borogroves, mome raths, and so on were real English words, the poem would have made perfect sense. As things stand, it only makes dream-sense.

Bankrupt_Word_Clerk, Carroll IS formal nonsense poetry. So are a bunch of others from his time. It was kind of an industry.

By the by, your English is better than most native speakers' most of the time. For whatever it's worth. Having finally gotten to my third fluent language, I appreciate what you've done with it.

I didn't mean to. I only meant myself. Seriously.

Not this time. I'm sure you guys get enough of me anyway.

No. It's much more difficult than that. And much less rewarding. Sigh...

Yes. This has been established ages ago. See here http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=123303 and here http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.jsp?id=123379

I like "subtitles". I'm not trying to be mean, it just struck me as cute.

Dear Christ you're a little hapless, aren't you?

No, I meant where he was performing was a Slam Poetry reading. I see being successful at cafe-performance-poetry as something so different from being successful at poetry that it's like comparing riding a bike to breaking a bike over your head.

re "I like to think this poem still has some resonance three years later, but you'll have to think harder about the historical context."

Do you think this makes it a more, or less, successful poem?

So many, in fact, that you're really not writing about men-in-general at all. You're just writing about a few guys and it's a shame you started the poem with "Let every man who ever had a father consider".

In short, I'm with everyone who says this doesn't track. Sure, most guys probably go through bitter periods (for me it'll be right around the time I realize I can't be a spaceman when I grow up) but get over it in time for a nice benevolent dotage. Right before they step out in front of the speeding bus.

POINT #1: This poem is plagiarized. If I've accused the wrong person, that doesn't make the poem less plagiarized.

POINT #2: lil_evil_boi, untamed_fierce, sacred_poet_me, and wow_ur_good only have two IP #s between them. Both are registered to Canadian service providers; one's a home and one's a small server, like in a school. As far as "coincidences happen you know" goes, the odds of this being a coincidence are absolutely astronomical.

POINT #3: So actually, it does prove something. Servers simply don't act like you're trying to say they do. And even if they did, the more likely explanation is that you're always logging out as lil_evil_boi and then immediately logging in under one of your other usernames from the same computer. It doesn't help any that you write EXACTLY THE SAME WAY under all your usernames.

POINT #4: re "24.69.255.205 or 195.157.153.249 or 213.146.148.199... I doubt all the users with those IP# are the same people". Actually, they are. They admitted it ages ago. Ace argument, though!

POINT #5: You are simply flabbergasting. What do you get out of it?

I posted criticism and then deleted it so it would only show up in raiyna's email. She's the only one who needs to read it and, contrary to popular belief, I'm not posting comments just to see myself talk.