Bear with me

The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:

The central conceit of glass in the mouth is genuinely strong, and it does real work across several stanzas. The physicality of it, the chewing, the blood, the mashed tongue, earns its place because it sustains rather than simply announces itself. That consistency of image is one of the poem's real strengths.

The opening line, however, is doing the poem a disservice. "I beg, bear with me" reads as an apology to the reader before the poem has even begun, and it unintentionally signals a lack of confidence in what follows. The poem does not need to ask permission. Cut it and let the glass line open the piece. The title already carries the bear/bare pun, so the plea in the first line becomes redundant if not slightly clumsy.

The Mummy line is a tonal problem. Up to that point the imagery is intimate and internally consistent, and then the poem reaches for a slightly theatrical, almost camp comparison that breaks the register. The line exists to convey volume of blood and a long duration of suffering, but the poem could find a more internally coherent way to do that work, something that keeps the reader inside the wound rather than stepping outside it briefly to reference a horror archetype.

The shadow stanza weakens as it goes. "Sat in a sunken corner" and "hid from the light" are familiar images of isolation that the poem has not yet earned the right to use, because the glass conceit is specific and surprising and these are not. "He, just as doomed as I" in particular lands as slightly melodramatic. The alliteration of "sunken" and "shadow" is the most interesting thing happening there and it is not quite enough to carry the section.

The final stanza is the best-constructed unit in the poem. It is compact, it completes the glass logic, and the double meaning of swallowing, relief versus annihilation, is earned rather than explained. The restraint there is something to carry back into the earlier stanzas.

The poem's main technical challenge going forward is calibrating diction. When it is precise and physical it is convincing. When it reaches for more conventional poetic language around darkness and isolation it loses altitude quickly. The revision work is essentially a culling exercise: protect the strange and specific, question everything that has appeared in a poem before.

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So good.  "I befriended a shadow..." 

Thank you,

L