hardwiring

[de la sympathie]

Title might be changed later. This is quick and sort of long.


health is a fickle and friendly creature; by far the strangest.
i have attempted amends with my neurons and synapses
and tried to shake hands with the reddest of blood cells
this heart palpitates at a fast pace on an unhappy track
towards death; and i try to be as kind as possible, measuring
staccato beats with glimpses of worldly beauty and a few good
books. to repay kindness is a gift and life - the happy accident.

i have fiddled around with the nerves and nodes and
stayed up all night agonizing with the bacteria. the narrowest
bones lend a cozy space to recline after the day's work is done
stitching up the myelin sheath when its insides become outsides.

so from where do these unkindnesses come? does a god
have the chance to look and disagree with the insides of life? i
should like to crawl in through the inner ear of some deity and
reorganize the bases and acids until they metastasize into
something much more difficult than they could have imagined. it
should be true that god is faulty the same way we are: wired
into codes and projected into programs that disassemble at the
slightest of provocations.

i don't pretend to know the code to the program, but it
seems unimaginable that anyone could have written it this way.

[fishingthe_sky]

health is a fickle and friendly creature; by far the strangest.
i have attempted amends with my neurons and synapses
and tried to shake hands with the reddest of blood cells
this heart palpitates at a fast pace on an unhappy track
towards death; and i try to be as kind as possible, measuring
staccato beats with glimpses of worldly beauty and a few good
books. to repay kindness is a gift and life - the happy accident.
I feel like this should start with the second line, and not the first, which is just a sort of cheesy way to enter into the poem. Why not throw us right into the heart of the matter (har har)? I like that you qualify the cliche in the last line with "the happy accident." Two things that are distracting me though are your lack of punctuation and your tendency for passive voice. It feels like there are far too many little words (articles and such) getting in between what you are talking about, making your lines sort of meander longer than they should. I liked the alliteration in "attempted amends" too, though I'm not sure if amends can be used in the way you are using it, grammatically speaking, though who ever said poets have to follow all the rules of grammar?

i have fiddled around with the nerves and nodes and
stayed up all night agonizing with the bacteria. the narrowest
bones lend a cozy space to recline after the day's work is done
stitching up the myelin sheath when its insides become outsides.
I think one of the article issues I mentioned above is your qualifying of everything as "the this." Get rid of all the "the's" and it will immediately sound less meandering. There's a nice internal rhyme, simple as it is, with "nodes/bones." Mentioning myelin makes me think of MS, though this has nothing to do with the poem itself.

so from where do these unkindnesses come? does a god
have the chance to look and disagree with the insides of life? i
should like to crawl in through the inner ear of some deity and
reorganize the bases and acids until they metastasize into
something much more difficult than they could have imagined. it
should be true that god is faulty the same way we are: wired
into codes and projected into programs that disassemble at the
slightest of provocations.
I like this stanza except for the bit after the semicolon. I'd cut it off and leave us with just having the gods be faulty, which doesn't need any sort of qualification or explanation to be potent.

i don't pretend to know the code to the program, but it
seems unimaginable that anyone could have written it this way.
Not a bad ending.

I think this is one of the more successful poems I've seen that makes use of the scientific building blocks, mostly because it demonstrates a working knowledge of their faculties but does not try to wax-scientific.

[de la sympathie]

health is a fickle and friendly creature; by far the strangest.
i have attempted amends with my neurons and synapses
and tried to shake hands with the reddest of blood cells
this heart palpitates at a fast pace on an unhappy track
towards death; and i try to be as kind as possible, measuring
staccato beats with glimpses of worldly beauty and a few good
books. to repay kindness is a gift and life - the happy accident.
I feel like this should start with the second line, and not the first, which is just a sort of cheesy way to enter into the poem. Why not throw us right into the heart of the matter (har har)? I like that you qualify the cliche in the last line with "the happy accident." Two things that are distracting me though are your lack of punctuation and your tendency for passive voice. It feels like there are far too many little words (articles and such) getting in between what you are talking about, making your lines sort of meander longer than they should. I liked the alliteration in "attempted amends" too, though I'm not sure if amends can be used in the way you are using it, grammatically speaking, though who ever said poets have to follow all the rules of grammar?

i have fiddled around with the nerves and nodes and
stayed up all night agonizing with the bacteria. the narrowest
bones lend a cozy space to recline after the day's work is done
stitching up the myelin sheath when its insides become outsides.
I think one of the article issues I mentioned above is your qualifying of everything as "the this." Get rid of all the "the's" and it will immediately sound less meandering. There's a nice internal rhyme, simple as it is, with "nodes/bones." Mentioning myelin makes me think of MS, though this has nothing to do with the poem itself.

so from where do these unkindnesses come? does a god
have the chance to look and disagree with the insides of life? i
should like to crawl in through the inner ear of some deity and
reorganize the bases and acids until they metastasize into
something much more difficult than they could have imagined. it
should be true that god is faulty the same way we are: wired
into codes and projected into programs that disassemble at the
slightest of provocations.
I like this stanza except for the bit after the semicolon. I'd cut it off and leave us with just having the gods be faulty, which doesn't need any sort of qualification or explanation to be potent.

i don't pretend to know the code to the program, but it
seems unimaginable that anyone could have written it this way.
Not a bad ending.

I think this is one of the more successful poems I've seen that makes use of the scientific building blocks, mostly because it demonstrates a working knowledge of their faculties but does not try to wax-scientific.

health is a fickle and friendly creature; by far the strangest.
i have attempted amends with my neurons and synapses
and tried to shake hands with the reddest of blood cells.
this heart palpitates at a fast pace on an unhappy track
towards death; and i try to be as kind as possible, measuring
staccato beats with glimpses of worldly beauty and a few good
books. to repay kindness is a gift and life - the happy accident.

i have fiddled around with nerves and nodes and
stayed up all night agonizing with bacteria. the narrowest
bones lend a cozy space to recline after the day's work is done
stitching up the myelin sheath when its insides become outsides.

so from where do these unkindnesses come? does a god
have the chance to look and disagree with the insides of life? i
should like to crawl in through the inner ear of some deity and
reorganize bases and acids until they metastasize into
something much more difficult than they could have imagined. it
should be true that god is faulty the same way we are: wired
into codes and projected into programs that disassemble at the
slightest of provocations.

i don't pretend to know the code to the program, but it
seems unimaginable that anyone could have written it this way.

I took out some of the "the's" that were describing things. Could you explain what you meant by "little words" besides the aforementioned "the"?

Thanks for taking the time to critique, by the way.

[bootsydan]

http://www.6lyrics.com/music/tim_minchin/lyrics/you_grew_on_me.aspx

^ That's lyrics to a song called "You Grew On Me" by musician/comedian Tim Minchin. Kind of a lighthearted version, successfully doing a somewhat similar thing to what you're doing here (although the themes are different). Just thought you might like to read it, I love it.

This was pretty neat.

[fishingthe_sky]

health is a fickle and friendly creature; by far the strangest.
i have attempted amends with my neurons and synapses
and tried to shake hands with the reddest of blood cells.
this heart palpitates at a fast pace on an unhappy track
towards death; and i try to be as kind as possible, measuring
staccato beats with glimpses of worldly beauty and a few good
books. to repay kindness is a gift and life - the happy accident.


The little words I mean are contained in phrases like "the reddest of blood cells" and "this heart palpitates at a face pace." Both of these phrases aren't bad, but they can be condensed to be more effective. Even saying "the reddest blood cells" is an improvement, because you're eliminating everything that's unnecessary to convey your image. I've found that typically, the less words you can use to make and convey an image/metaphor/idea, the stronger the image/metaphor/idea becomes. It seems silly, worrying about one simple word, but it can be the difference between a good poem and a great one.