Years Race By

You always have the capacity to surprise me, Incan I think that's what I like best about your poems: you can tell they're yours, but they never get boring because they never say the same thing twice.

Anyway.

I felt through parts of the second stanza I wasnt getting it -- particularly here:

"so I study the bellies of splay-footed newts,
feel the bite of rope swing on my palm
as I hoist my body's weight again."

Not quite clear on how this connects to the rest of the piece. Other than that, though, another awesome poem. I really liked the garden imagery. My particular favourite line is "But I will steal the youth my neighbors never use" - well, that and virtually the entire final stanza. It really tied the poem together for me and made a very strong finale.

Kudos, as usual

You overuse excess imagery, especially in the first stanza, and I don't think it helps the poem at all but just makes it thicker to wade through.

This poem was too abstract and that made it hard to read, so I think you need to simple it a bit and try to get your point across more clearly, because I am left at a loss of understanding of the meaning in this poem.

I'm guessing this meant something about lost youth? I think the images of bugs and newts and such was overused too much, but then again, it helped keep the poem on an understandable level. You always do manage to surprise me, Incan-just try to make the stanzas clearer by using clearer language (sorry about the redundancy), and you should be good to go!

Good, as always. I loved the imagery, particularly at the beginning. The only parts I really didn't like were the bits where it talked about a 'we'; I had a clear sense of the narrator, and of the boy, but not together. I guess maybe because the narrator was an observer and so much buried inside his own thoughts and emotions. Perhaps that was what you were getting at. Anyway the lines

I recgonize a little of me has rubbed off on him,

and

What we have most in common is our enemy, sleep.

seemed very clunky. I have no idea who this 'we' is, and it doesn't seem right to have two characters that are very vividly conveyed and one that just appears in two lines and is left lost and bereft of personality, as 'we' is.