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

The poem's best move is its restraint. The final image — Arthur adjusting the blinds by a single slat for succulents who "could not phrase but clearly required" it — earns its quiet without underlining the point. The phrase "a balance the succulents could not phrase" does real work: it locates the value of Arthur's gift in something pre-verbal and unverifiable, which is more interesting than making him a hidden hero. The parallel specialists (aquarium-reader, elevator-reader) are well-chosen because they sit at the same altitude of absurdity as Arthur without upstaging him, and "the crowd applauded politely" is a small, precise cut.

The main area for attention is the opening two stanzas, which explain the premise a little too fully before the poem has earned the reader's trust. "Definitely unremarkable / if not for the quiet rise of specialists around him" is doing the same work the rest of the poem does more gracefully through scene — it tells the reader how to read what follows rather than letting the succulents' argument about the blinds speak for itself. Cutting or compressing those lines, and letting the Midtown and East End specialists arrive sooner without the editorial frame, would sharpen the tonal control the poem clearly reaches by its close. The HTML fragments and trailing punctuation at the end appear to be formatting artifacts rather than intentional choices; if the dots are meant as a visual beat, they would benefit from a cleaner, more deliberate placement.

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