Chinese Puzzle-Box

[tommy's ghost]

My head is a Chinese puzzle-box
Made of marble lesions and
Zirconium-coated rocks.
It glows in the dark at night,
A hue that runs deeper
Than the shade of a Lophiiforme’s pupil.
It’s a redundant shine,
Camouflaged by my shadow-padded room.
I bob my foreign cube in rhythm
To my intrepid mental missions,
In which I hunt for food for thought.
But,
There always seems to be a drought.
All my ideas have already been caught.
They’re either caged, behind locks,
Or being eaten by contemporary shmucks.

[tommy's ghost]

Would love to hear thoughts on it.

[The Personist]

Not gonna lie, total lols at the "contemporary shmucks." However,I don't feel like it fits. I think you're cutting back on some of your poetic masturbation (overly done alliteration, etc.) but I still think this is fairly lofty and hard to connect with for a reader. Poetry is, as I read in a review of a Yusef Komunyakaa book, a marriage of meaning and music. The meaning is getting lost because you're trying to write more complex music. Lophiiforme is kind of over that line of "stuff you could google to find out the meaning of" and "stuff that you googled so you could use it in your poem." Not saying you did, but it feels that way.

"Marble lesions" is cool, though.

[tommy's ghost]

Not gonna lie, total lols at the "contemporary shmucks." However,I don't feel like it fits. I think you're cutting back on some of your poetic masturbation (overly done alliteration, etc.) but I still think this is fairly lofty and hard to connect with for a reader. Poetry is, as I read in a review of a Yusef Komunyakaa book, a marriage of meaning and music. The meaning is getting lost because you're trying to write more complex music. Lophiiforme is kind of over that line of "stuff you could google to find out the meaning of" and "stuff that you googled so you could use it in your poem." Not saying you did, but it feels that way.

"Marble lesions" is cool, though.

Haha. I added the last line to add to the quirk value of the poem. And I might have looked around for a more sophisticated form of angler fish..

Oh and thank you.