The opening line "[l]oneliness can be described in simple terms" had me expecting that this poem would do just that...tell me a story that made me feel lonely. Instead, it was a technical discussion of emotion. It could have, more properly should have, been an evocation of the emotion through an intimate relation of personal experience. We have all felt loneliness. We feel it every day. We know what it feels like. What we do not know is what it feels like for you to be lonely, and this piece ...

Very well written...I am appreciative of your style of stringing together ideas which on the surface seem to be inconsistent, but at their core are completely logical (i.e. streets full to the brim with emptiness, etc...) You paint a gray world emotionally...a little more on the darker end of the spectrum than the lighter. Good use of tangible imagery to evoke the emotional response you seek.

I give you kudos for your true haikus...blackberry winter, envy, nurture, and serenade. I give you 10s for these Since the others are simply 5/7/5 syllabic structure without mention of season, and thus not haiku, I give you a 6 for these. For a weighted, rounded score of 8. Reflections of me is an excellent Senryu. Beautiful.

I can appreciate the sentiment/theme. However, there isn't enough imagery here to make me "feel" the poem. It has the effect of being told what to feel, instead of being shown something and having the feeling evoked from the experience. I am left wanting... ...wanting to know the nature of the relationship, what happened to bring it to this point, etc... But I don't merely want to be told these things; I really want to be shown them. Hope that makes sense. Also, if and when you do a re-write,...

Lyrical, empowered, and spiteful. I enjoy it. It'd be interesting if it gave a little more personal information, some greater detail, like the nature of the games being played, and if you developed characterizations of the players.

Who doesn't love a good metaphor about drug addiction. Though, I wouldn't necessarily have gotten it if you hadn't spelled it out in your intro. Pablo Escobar had hippos on his compound (the real kind, of course) that now roam freely in the jungle. Definitely a foreign habitat. Sobriety is quite the battle. I can appreciate the reference to the return of meat to the bones, for I too was once a walking skeleton.

Pretty romantic language for such a bitter message. Perhaps that was partly of necessity to adhere to the structure of the rhyme scheme. There are parts of this which I found strong and engaging, such as the phrase "[t]he heel of your confusion," which struck me as an appropriate personification. There are other parts where your language seemed a little convenient, such as "[y]ou are the moon in the distant heavens," when you could have really extended the distance by making the moon the moon...

The first "best supports" your position. But it's not a very complete explanation as to why that theory is not compatible with other evolutionary theory. However, having read both, I am left thinking that both cooperation and competition work simultaneously, and neither concept is mutually exclusive. So, I don't see the need for the "swipe" at Dawkins, and I think it undercuts the point of Margulis' theory by making a pointless and unsubstantiated dig at Dawkins.

I like all of this except the "Oliver Twist" reference. I can't see a pimp as "Oliver," but more like "Fagin." I appreciate the way this could be literally about a prostitute, or also about a barfly just looking for sex, with the pimp being the compulsion, or just about addiction. The androgeny of the piece also works well.

It's difficult to critique a piece about drug-related death without sounding trite. But I assume you want honest criticism. I struggled with the transition in the fourth stanza. I didn't see the need to begin the third line with "Or" as it added nothing. I would have simply begun with "[w]as...". I also found the imagery of "unlocking the mystery" boring. It's recycled. Can you express the same idea in a novel way? I liked the last stanza best. It read like quicksand; heavy and inescapable.