Thank you for your detailed feedback! Your interpretation is fascinating as always.

Interesting point about moving the entire piece off the left margin; I haven't experimented with this before, but it's definitely something to try in the future.

The "image in reverse" was originally intended to be very literal - a reference to how pinhole cameras (the titular "camera obscura") - project images mirrored/in reverse, but the layer of additional meaning you added would be very interesting to explore.

I fly night-blind

Landing on the "I" sounds, like a visual and audio focus.

through life.

Breaking from the edge, the movement and the speaker are one, moving away from the initial point.

We collide.

'life', the reader, 'life' as the reader?  Returning back to the edge, the movement halted where it began.

&#x200B;

Left in the wreckage:

Movement moving 'left', the speakers and "life"/reader merged into their own destruction.

spinal column, struts of rib,

A 'column' laid 'left', the image building on the "struts of ribs" like a ship's skeleton.

scapulae⁠—broad wings

The evisceration, almost like an ancient torture that reveals the divine origins beneath.

emptied, like

The 'like' is standing out a bit.  A bone of poetry?  

a ghost or a reflection,

The internal essence as both?  Astral and physical projections?

an image in reverse.

This feels a little too esoteric, and in a piece full esoteric developments, that's saying something.  The image creates the form, the ideal m

Thank you for your comment! I'm very excited to receive feedback from you; your critique is always insightful and thought-provoking. 

>"Or" feels too noncommittal, especially since stanzas two and three take a much more detached perspective from the first. I expect a greater precision when you set out to catalog the wreckage, and then perform an autopsy on it. 

This is the kind of attention to detail I love in your feedback :D I hadn't considered this at all before you mentioned it.

About black boxes speaking - this is in reference to them playing back recordings of the terminal incident.

You make a very good point about refocusing. I wanted to use both meanings of "black box" to describe the soul/heart/self/whatever - both a flight recorder (intact and removed after the body is "emptied") and a mechanism whose inner workings are unknown (hence the darkness/hidden chamber metaphor), and I got carried away conflating ideas.

>I fly night-blind  
>through life.  

Interesting idea. I'm trying to make the connection between night-blindness and the title; I know that a camera obscura requires a dark room. It's not quite clicking together for me yet, but by this point I'm intrigued. Thematically, would this be about ignorance? Or a deliberate unwillingness to see something? "Fly" suggests bird to me, but from the wreckage and black box later, I see that we're doing more of a plane metaphor. 

>We collide.  

Hmm. Seems like more could be done with this. Collide is almost too clinical? It seems that you're going for brevity and understatement here, which is far from my forte.  

>Left in the wreckage:  
>spinal column, struts of rib  
>scapulae--broad wings  

The wreck is now cataloged. It seems the speaker has left the poem in the collision. "Left in the wreckage" could be redundant; might the list of items speaks for itself without introduction? Perhaps not. I'm having a hard time here because part of me wan

I've been using markdown as well, but can't seem to get a paragraph spacing between:

example one

like this (too small)

--- and ---

example two

&nbsp;

like this (too big)

---

I'd really appreciate any suggestions/advice for this issue if possible.

yeah, I usually use markdown mode for that reason—the learning curve isn't too bad. reddit wasn't designed for poetry 🤷‍♀️

Thank you for your feedback! I'm glad you enjoyed the poem (and my username lol) 

Re: the title, etymology is such a fun source of wordplay, isn't it?

Agree that "through life" is forced; in retrospect, I was having too much fun with the assonance and stressed syllables. Good point about stanza imbalance.

"or" seems to be a point of contention for several people, will need to rethink that line.

The space between stanzas is unfortunately an artifact of Reddit formatting; unless I format the entire poem as code, it's either too little or too much space between stanzas.

I can definitely see how some of my previous poems tend purple (some more intentionally so than others). I look forward to seeing more poetry from you too!

love the title. something so wonderful about latin, isn't there, our grandmother language? even better when it doesn't struggle to be understood. dark chamber... thanks for letting me in on how camera meant chamber. english is really the obscurest of languages.

love "night-blind." good tie-in with collide. I'm not sure about the "through life," though—seems a bit hand-wavey, bit of a forced rhyme. something a little too simple and small about the first stanza; the slightest expansion could give you more of a gradation, if you look at the contrast between stanza sizes. 

> Left in the wreckage:  
> spinal column, struts of rib,  
> scapulae⁠—  
wonderfully anatomic. I think of a dying plane. open corpse. 

> broad wings  
> emptied, like  
>      a ghost or a reflection,  
this is less good. not as much specificity, you're not as sure of what you mean. pick one.

> an image in reverse.  
👍

*the four hidden chambers

> the black box of the human soul.  
wonderful, touching ending.

I 


Hello readers, welcome to OCpoetry. This subreddit is a writing workshop community -- a place where poets of all skill levels can share, enjoy, and talk about each other's poetry. Every person who's shared, including the OP above, has given some feedback (those are the links in the post) and hopes to receive some in return (from you, the readers).

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I fly night-blind  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;through life.  
We collide.

&amp;nbsp;

Left in the wreckage:  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;spinal column, struts of rib,  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;scapulae⁠—broad wings  
emptied, like  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;a ghost or a reflection,  
an image in reverse.

&amp;nbsp;

The autopsy reveals  
those four hidden chambers  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;of the heart; and perhaps,  
&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;intact and still speaking,  
the black box of the human soul.

&amp;nbsp;

&amp;nbsp;

[feedback 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/uh3yh5/a_screenplay_written_by_a_madman/i74540s/) / [feedback 2](https://www.reddit.com/r/OCPoetry/comments/ugnuyr/under_the_pier/i76fqnw/)