Shambles

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

The extended metaphor of warfare gives the poem a coherent governing logic, and the central conceit — an unseen enemy that will certainly strike, only the timing unknown — captures the particular dread of living with something unpredictable and recurring. The choice to keep the threat unnamed throughout is effective; it lets the poem describe a felt experience rather than diagnose it, and the title "Shambles" pulls double duty, naming both the disordered state of the situation and anticipating the "Shambling" gait of the second stanza.

That verbal echo between "Shambles" and "Shambling" is one of the poem's stronger moves, and the second stanza generally lands better than the first because it trades the abstract military vocabulary for physical sensation. The image of existence "Pinched into a slim fragment" is vivid and specific, and the final lines, with peace measured out in "narrow slices" and the peach "eaten slowly," give the poem a tactile close that earns its sense of hard-won savoring.

The first stanza, by contrast, leans on a cluster of military terms — guerilla, campaigner, enlisted, quarry, attack — that begin to crowd one another. Because several of these words carry similar weight, the metaphor states itself more than it deepens. Choosing one or two of these figures and letting them develop, rather than naming the whole field at once, would let the imagery do more work. The line "only that it will!" makes explicit a certainty the preceding lines have already established, and the exclamation point asks the reader to feel an urgency the words have not quite built; cutting or recasting this line might let the dread sit more uneasily.

One small tension worth weighing: the peach simile is the warmest image in the poem, but it arrives in a stanza otherwise concerned with fragility and threat. The contrast can be powerful, though "tasty" is a flatter word than the moment seems to want, and a more precise sensory detail there could match the care the rest of the line shows. Consider also whether "existence is fragile" might be trusted to the surrounding images rather than stated outright, since the "slim fragment" and "narrow slices" already convey that fragility.

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 the gist of this one immediately.
The invader unaware of the guerilla, defending their homeland.

I think that the use of shambling with carefully, is almost an oxymoron, as shambling is used to describe a slow, shuffling, awkward gait. Maybe use stumbling, I can see stumbling carefully, trying not to lose focus.  

Pinched into a slim fragment,
each 24 hour shift vulnerable.

The perfect way to describe surviving day-to-day.
Welcome to Neo. ~ Geezer.