My doctrine

Hiiii!!! This is intense! Immediately, I noticed how obsessed this poem is with endings that never really arrive. There's this constant desire for something to become final... Yet you repeatedly interrupt that finality:

Reprieve doesn’t last forever,

& especially:

I don’t obey the dogma, unfortunately there will be morrow.

I REALLY like that second line conceptually!! Because "morrow" ordinarily sounds hopeful—tomorrow means continuation, possibility, another day—but here continuation itself is treated like punishment. The narrator isn't afraid that life will end, which interested me. I found it way more unique that they're horrified that it keeps beginning again. That inversion establishes something important about the entire poem: concepts that ordinarily promise transcendence don't necessarily offer the narrator comfort. Cool!

I see it when the moon hits horizon
I’m fully nullity, I’m wrecked inside my prison
My guilty pleasure is my dying hope

The moon hitting the horizon is already this image of something departing. Instead of sunrise introducing the poem's movement, I like watching something celestial sink out of sight, which pairs nicely with how frequently the poem later speaks about dissolution and descent.

"I’m fully nullity" is grammatically strange, but interesting conceptually. They're not saying "I feel empty"; they're basically saying "I am emptiness." That distinction feels important considering how later the poem becomes increasingly interested in "nihility," "finitudes," "entropy," and the possibility that philosophy can explain suffering.

Though this is also where my biggest criticism begins!!! There are places where the poem seems to be choosing the most elaborate possible word rather than the most precise word. Dense vocabulary absolutely works for this narrator—they seem desperately cerebral, maybe trying to think themselves out of suffering (?)—but sometimes the unusual diction creates meaning, and other times it obscures meaning.

For example...

The crud of knotty life-devotion
Congealing into Daedalian confess
Existence sinking into huge implosion
Salvation wouldn’t come to grasping mess.

"Congealing" is GREAT here. Something normally fluid becoming thick and immobile fits the poem's obsession with being trapped. "Daedalian" is also a fascinating choice. But "Daedalian confess" feels grammatically incomplete; I think "confession" is probably what was intended. "Huge implosion," meanwhile, is much less distinctive than the vocabulary surrounding it. Implosion already communicates a massive inward collapse, so "huge" doesn't really sharpen the image.

That makes

My guilty pleasure is my dying hope
My ember expects is that I won’t end in the rope

interesting to me despite the awkward syntax.

That's why I think the poem's philosophical and religious vocabulary (?) works best when it is actively failing the narrator. They keep accumulating enormous systems through which human beings have historically tried to understand existence—Christian imagery, Greek philosophy, Nietzsche, mythology—and none of them manage to fully contain what they're feeling.

Your ideas are already complex!! And I REALLY like the possibility that the speaker's grandest tragedy isn't merely that they suffer, but that they are intelligent enough to construct elaborate explanations for their suffering without necessarily being able to escape it. They seek transcendence everywhere, and the terrifying final development is that despair itself begins impersonating transcendence... So deep. Keep writing poetry!!!

Take care,
Ulyana xoxo