Denial

What do you do when you've failed yourself?
This is a difficult question; people don't want
to think about this question.
Everyone's already got everyone else to please.
Do you disown yourself?
Do you change your name?
No,
no, you lie awake all night,
watching the shadows of great men dance on your eyelids.
You watch the golden shine become light as
a single tendril from a hummingbird's feather
and as heavy as an ocean in the same instant.
Visible, but nothing any artist could capture.
A photographer's dream.
Nothing within anyone but its own grasp.
It's, in the same instant, both
a charging elephant
and the underside of a blue whale
and a mouse's tail escaping around the corner
a pair of joyless eyes surrounded by
paint.
What do you do when you've failed yourself?
You deny.

Hello! I figure I'm not going to start off criticising, so I have to say: the imagery in this poem is outstanding.

My real concern in the first "stanza" (if that's what I may call the first seven lines of the poem). It seems to me as though you were writing an informative essay. It didn't feel like poetry to me until I came to the second stanza. Perhaps you could change the questions in the first stanza to statements:

"I have failed myself
I will disown
and change my name
but no."

I just think that we know that, "What do you do when you've failed yourself?" is a difficult question, and, clearly, we don't want to think about it. With the omission of the second and third lines, the first stanza would be very lovely.

TimothyW wrote:you lie awake all night,
watching the shadows of great men dance on your eyelids.
You watch the golden shine become light as
a single tendril from a hummingbird's feather
and as heavy as an ocean in the same instant.
Visible, but nothing any artist could capture.
A photographer's dream.
Nothing within anyone but its own grasp.
It's, in the same instant, both
a charging elephant
and the underside of a blue whale
and a mouse's tail escaping around the corner
a pair of joyless eyes surrounded by
paint.
What do you do when you've failed yourself?
You deny.

Now, all I can say to the rest of this poem, is that I couldn't have said it better myself, although the spacing and tabs confused me a bit.

Please acknowledge that you reserve the right to completely disregard the aforesaid compliments and criticism.

Oh my the imagery in this is very very good. It takes a special sort of thinking to come up with something that paints so good a picture. I find nothing wrong with this, I really enjoyed it.
Keep up the writing, if you'd like.