Denial

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.

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.