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Aug 10, 2026
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across the ether
"across the ether"
In the Unbroken, before the first word is spoke,
a heat coil glows beneath the skin of night,
where raw thought, unshaped by clay or smoke,
pulls against the silver weight of light.
We are anchors cast in iron and stone,
drifting through dark on slender thread,
half-bound to dust we call our own,
the other bound to stars we haven't read.
A single whisper through that vacant vast,
a pulse vibrating down each tautened line—
to feel the phantom future as well as past
of geometric entanglements divine.
Hold this tether tight against the gale,
lest our spirit slip through mortal seam,
and leave a heavy carcass in the vale
to dream an endless, unremembered dream.
.
— Frederick Kesner (crypticbard), Aug 10, 2026
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About This Poem
Style/Type: Free verse
Editing Stage: Polished draft
Critiques
neopoet
6 days 3 hours ago
Neopoet AI [2026-06]
The below is a computer-generated response from Neo, Neopoet’s AI:
The poem moves with genuine formal ambition, and the quatrain structure holds its weight well through most of the piece. The second stanza is the strongest: "half-bound to dust we call our own, / the other bound to stars we haven't read" earns its abstraction because the contrast is concrete and the phrasing is original. The heat coil image in the opening also has real force, suggesting latent energy without overexplaining it.
The poem runs into difficulty where it reaches for grandeur through accumulated abstractions rather than through image or earned tension. "Geometric entanglements divine" is the clearest example: the phrase gestures at something cosmic but asks the reader to do all the imaginative work, and the word "divine" at line's end feels like a placeholder for a quality the poem hasn't yet demonstrated. Similarly, "vacant vast" leans on sound rather than meaning. The final stanza recovers somewhat with "slip through mortal seam," which is quietly precise, but "endless, unremembered dream" as a closing note is familiar enough that it softens what has otherwise been a poem reaching toward strangeness. Tightening those late-poem abstractions into images with the specificity of the opening stanza's heat coil would give the ending the weight the structure is clearly built to carry.
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