How to Fake Affection -or- How the West was Juan

Could've needled endlessly
from shore to useless sparkling crag,
had not the demi-god of your
hopeless vocal undulating decreed
cancer of the mutual understanding

oh, how I detest the lover's touch of your words

could've been a poet had not the
caged, howling Einsteins of the day
discovered beauty to be a spinning reticulate
between the third and fourth catechism
of society's almighty fluid-filled sack

written on the wall of a thousand inside-out eyes

could've been a better man
is what they keep telling me;
I can't seem to fire this nail gun fast enough
into that fertile metaphysical sphere
without catching snatches of gossip
vituperating in REM pulses
toward coyly deigned cortexes

(might we one day catch lips without infecting nations with our rhetoric? One can only hope the corpse in that well doesn't cry out for human rights; sweep their dusty homes in full fire gear, leave not even the rats to roost)

Would've consecrated the asses
but their braying brought
the angel painted bricks of
courthouse domes on our receptive guests,
pushing microwaved sewage out onto the
flashbulb steps

proving once and for all what dialectic replaces organs with

Hey there! I'm going to mostly pick out lines and comment because that always feels like the easiest way to review poetry but I'll try to give you a few closing lines too:

Could've needled endlessly
from shore to useless sparkling crag,

[In essence I really like this, there's immediately a 'story-telling' tone to your narrator and needled is a great choice of word. I don't like sparkling though. I feel that it takes away from the distant, almost morbid feel of the other words. I can see you're perhaps trying to find a contrast to useless but maybe something along the lines of 'oasis' or 'budding'.]

could've been a poet had not the
caged, howling Einsteins of the day
discovered beauty to be a spinning reticulate
between the third and fourth catechism
of society's almighty fluid-filled sack

[I love this stanza inside out but I'm starting to feel the poem as a whole lacks punctuation. It isn't always a bad thing but you should use punctuation to emphasise ideas and emotions. I think it's best to stick with conventional punctuation except where you want to draw attention to something.]

(might we one day catch lips without infecting nations with our rhetoric? One can only hope the corpse in that well doesn't cry out for human rights; sweep their dusty homes in full fire gear, leave not even the rats to roost

[I like your wording here but the format is off putting. Before I scrolled down I thought perhaps the poem had ended and this was just some vague comment you was adding in.]

Your ending is very well crafted just like the most of your poem and I don't really have much criticism. In general it's very well put together if perhaps a little wordy in places but that's fine as I get the feeling you're reaching out toward the more intellectually minded people anyway. Just try not to do that too often or you'll be left with a very select audience which is already too much the case for poets.

I'm afraid this rather fails as a review but I hope if nothing else it proved as encouragement and might attract some more insightful comments from others,

Heather xx

Hey, thanks for the review. I'm afraid it's not the case that I purposefully seek out intellectual audiences. For some reason this is just the most natural way for my stuff to come out. And I think that if I changed that it would lose even more feel. Ah well, there's always prose for me to be writing.