from memory, night terrors

You have a strong vocabulary and a strong handle on words, and I'd challenge you with this poem to let the words BE suffocating and thick instead of describing them as such.

Image:

"Darkness is a shroud
a shroud"

in place of your current first stanza. What does this do for you? For me, it becomes more certain and solid. The repetition places focus on the shroud, and takes a little away from the cliche that is "a shroud of darkness". By letting the reader get deeper into the meaning of the actual comparison, which we usually skip over because of the fact that it's a cliche, we might get that sense of the suffocation of fabric, dark and black.

You seem to quantify everything: "images" with "persistent", "hands" with "grimy", "pressure" with "immuring", etc., but what of the strength already present in these words? First, I'll temporarily ignore the fact that pressure and aches and shrieks aren't images so they don't really work with the introduction of the sentence (please clear that up!), but look:

Blinking,
images burn into life:
hands and pressure
aches and shrieks,
muscle: taut and carnivorous.

I kept the two last adjectives because they were strong and specific. Grimy could have been specific, but it instead jars the reader out of the tone of the poem. Grimy seems to household to fit in with nighmares for me. Immure is good and specific, but I took it out to show you the rhythm of the bare words. I don't need crippling or muffled at all. If a shriek is muffled, and you can't say shriek alone, then find the right word for the sound you were making.

In the next stanza, we know what smoke is. Smoke, on its own, can suffocate, and is thick. If you combined that stanza with the last like this:

Waking,
hacking through smoke.
Breathing,
barely breathing.

We'd get the idea of suffocating without you having to explain it.

Now, I'm not saying you should change your poem to the stanzas I've rewritten, but I wanted to illustrate what I think a poem like this could use: strong, solid, suffocating words of their own merit, not watered down with adjectives and other qualifiers. What do you think?

PM me or leave me a wall post if you have comments or questions, as I don't receive notifications of replies to my reviews.

Good luck and keep writing!

Wow! Another great poem!

Once again, no spelling problems, which is always a great relief. It's really cool the way you portray different emotions. Though the actual word is never mentioned, this whole poem almost felt like a description of fear itself, which is incredible.

There are a couple of punctuation things that were bugging me.

"Darkness,
it hovers like a shroud"

I think this would flow better if you got rid of the comma after darkness and also the 'it' of the second line, but that's just personal preference, I guess. Or else I suppose a full stop after 'darkness' would sound better too, a period or a colon.

"Blinking,
but persistent images burn to life—"

This I think should definitely be changed. Flow aside, the grammar of putting a comma after 'blinking' is not correct. Although this doesn't really matter as much in poetry, I'm still picky about it.

"constrained muscle—
taut and carnivorous."

Just something to think about, because this is the way I read it- do you really mean that the muscle is carnivorous? Or that whoever's muscle it is is carnivorous? Or something else entirely? ...

"hacking through smoke,
suffocating and thick.
 
Breathing,
barely breathing."

This is my favorite. Simply beautiful. And a perfect ending.

Blue