Summer Heat 2 (a second impression of the 2013 film Hawaii)

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

The poem works hardest and best when it lets concrete images carry the weight rather than abstraction. Lines like "A smell ripens on the bed golden" and "I lift it up to meet the moonlit lake" land because they trust a single sensory detail to do the work, and the inverted syntax of "on the bed golden" earns its strangeness by foregrounding the ripening before locating it. The recurring "Dos ananás" and the figure of "little Martín with his orange figurine" function as effective anchors — small recurring objects that give a sprawling, associative poem something to return to, so that the final reappearance of "Dos ananás...whereat feelings tied" reads as a deliberate closing of a loop rather than mere repetition.

The poem's central tension — between watching something on a "cropped screen" and the lived intimacy it depicts — is its strongest organizing idea. The "smearing lens," the "small windows," and the closing line about "the small windows, smaller the state Hawaii" build a coherent thread about mediation, memory, and the distance between viewer and viewed. That thread is where the poem feels most purposeful, and the framing of the title as "a second impression" supports it.

Where the poem is less effective is in its register. The verbal energy frequently tips into rhyme-driven momentum that pulls attention away from feeling and toward wordplay. Strings like "About the pry-and-pride, about the lies yours and mine" or "Aren't I so smart, duh!" rhyme so insistently that the sound seems to choose the next word before the meaning does. The borrowed line "facts don't care about feelings" arrives with cultural baggage that sits oddly against the poem's more intimate, elegiac material, and the parenthetical asides ("oh no they don't babe!") deflate moments the poem elsewhere treats with seriousness. One avenue worth testing: in a revision, isolate three or four of the passages built mainly on rhyme and ask of each whether the image or the feeling survives if the rhyme is loosened. Where it does not, the line is likely working for sound alone.

A related issue is density of figurative claim. Some images compress so many registers at once — "The germs are gonna unionize to a lei," "Consecration bestowed upon us rednecks," "The employment contract needs to transact" — that the religious, economic, and bodily metaphors compete rather than reinforce. The sacramental sequence ("incandescent cross," "where Jesus rests," "our fingers guide anointment") is the most sustained metaphor in the poem and could carry real charge, but it is interrupted before it accumulates. Letting that consecration imagery run a few lines longer, without the pivot to "rednecks" and "employment contract," might allow it the gravity it reaches for.

The closing movement is the poem's most successful stretch of sustained tone. "Forgive me, for I don't see" through the final line maintains a quieter, more unified voice, and "Kiss goodbye to your stifling tethers / Caress you like the silver lining hovers" resolves the watcher-and-watched tension with tenderness rather than the irony that governs the middle sections. If the earlier passages trusted that quieter register more often, the shifts into wordplay would register as deliberate contrast rather than as the poem's default mode.

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that you didn't read the syllabus that says the poem must be 40 lines or less, if you want to cut it down to 40 or a close proximity. Re-submit it. Nice stuff, by the way. ~ Geezer.

This is a tad beyond me I'm afraid, I'm hoping its not, AI.
Its given me a headache.

Give 'em 'ell Kell.

Obi.