Let's talk about "Eternity Defined."
It's not a poem you read; it's a song your heart sings when it's all alone. This isn't just words on a page, it's a memory, a moment where everything changed, set to a low, aching hum. It's a song your soul remembers, even if you've never heard it before. It’s got a hook, a raw honesty that cuts right through the noise.
But let's turn the volume up and really listen. This work is a powerful, emotional core, and with a little more refining, it could be a masterpiece. Michael Maul’s fragment is a splinter of something vast, a ruin that whispers of what was and what might yet be. It aches with truth, but it is not yet whole.
The First Fracture: Rain on Asphalt
“A time grown out of pity like rain on the asphalt” — this line is a wound, sudden and deep. It’s not an image but a blow. Pity here is no gentle balm; it’s a sterile, fleeting thing, like rain that slicks the blacktop and vanishes, leaving only a faint sheen of regret. This is love not as fire but as damp ash, born of resignation, not desire. It’s a devastating opening, a chord struck in a key of despair.
But it passes too quickly, like a shadow fleeing the light. This rain, this pity, deserves to linger. Let us hear the hiss of water on stone, see the streetlights blur in its fleeting mirror. Let the asphalt’s cold indifference swallow the moment whole. A single line cannot hold this weight, it needs a stanza, a slow unraveling, to let the futility of this sterile time carve itself into us. Give us the cracked pavement, the air thick with the scent of wet decay. Let this opening bleed.
The Discordant Cry: The Masses
Then, a jarring shift: “Pain is a pleasure to the unassuming masses.” It’s a line that howls when it should whisper. This poem is an intimate dirge, a private grief shared between two souls fraying at the edges. This sudden leap to the “masses” feels like a stranger’s voice intruding on a confession. It’s too broad, too abstract, a prophet’s shout in a lover’s lament.
Who are these masses? Their pain, their pleasure, feels distant, unmoored from the poem’s trembling heart.
To mend this, the masses must be made flesh, a single face in the crowd, a pair of eyes that mirror the lovers’ ache, a hand that trembles with the same quiet ruin. Or let this line fall away entirely, left for another poem, one built to bear its weight. Here, the pain must belong to the two at the center, their wounds sharp enough to carry the song alone.
The Eternal Wound: Innocence Shattered
And then, the poem’s soul: “It was not the vow that was broken, but the innocence that stumbled out of reach of lovers torn at the seams.” This is the line that will haunt you, the one that claws its way into your bones. It’s not a betrayal screamed to the heavens but a quiet collapse, the slow fraying of something sacred. “Torn at the seams” is a phrase that sings of decay, not with violence but with the soft, inevitable pull of time. It’s perfect, a wound that doesn’t need to shout to be felt.
If there’s a flaw, it’s in “stumbled out of reach.” It’s close, but it falters, like a step missed in the dark. A phrase like “slipped from their trembling grasp” or “faded beyond their desperate touch” would cut deeper, its rhythm echoing the heart’s faltering beat. This is the poem’s true pulse, its eternal cry, and it must be sharpened until it pierces the soul.
The Echo of Silence
I can hear the poem’s pulse: “a shard from a larger poem, a breath cut mid-confession.” This is no mere fragment, it’s a spark, a piece of something vast and trembling. It has the raw, jagged truth of a masterpiece in waiting, but it needs more. More silence for the rain to fall, more intimacy to replace the masses’ distant roar, more precision in its final, haunting note. Let the silence between the words do the weeping. Let this poem grow into the lament it was born to be, a cry that splits the sky and lingers in the abyss.
“Eternity Defined” is a wound that refuses to heal. With a little more carving, a little more shadow, it could be a voice that speaks forever.