Drowning

Books that are not books
Cling to fake oak
Scotch dribbles down
Into the fountains of youth
The Jazz Singer belts
And Fitzgerald spies through specs
Jotting lines in his palm-handled
Notebook
The melodic suffraging goes on
Noticed
In vacant slits of irony
Daisy flits among the crowd cooing at
The pallbearers; chimeras in their own concoctions
Of Beelzebub and champagne wishes
Milton would be proud that
The hero is at a loss but
Drowning in self sufficiency
Everyone is drowning here
In fountains of youth
And hitandrun acquaintances
Everyone is drowning here
Naive and quarrelsome
With ideas of smokestacks and
Opium dens and war
Seeping out of conversations now filled
To the brim
Spilling over sopping up yesterdays
Bread
No one cares much
For everyone is drowning here.

Wow...how long has it been since I've actually critiqued or posted something? Tis strange, I know. But I am back! Rar!

Anyway, I like some of the imagery in this piece, but the flow is a little out of place. Especially towards the end where you suddenly repeat about them drowning four times in the last half of the poem when you didn't repeat anything in the first half. It just doesn't flow right. Especially right here

Drowning in self sufficiency
Everyone is drowning here

You used drowning twice, right after the other, and with nothing to break it up. I saw that several times in this. Places where there needs to be a break or a punctuation mark of some kind because you are heading towards a new idea. Otherwise it just bogs up in the brain and makes the reader have to reead the lines a couple of times to get them straight. Otherwise, decent poem. I don't understand some of the refernces, but that's ok. We haven't read the same kind of literature obviously.