7/8 Theseus’s Ship

Wow. I really like this. The sentiment expressed in this poem is both alien and very familiar, which I think makes it ideal for exploring through the medium of poetry, and the hypothetical you construct is an excellent vehicle. I think you made the right call using the first-person voice for this one... sometimes relationship and feeling poems benefit from a more removed perspective but here it feels just right.

There are a few pieces that aren't working for me quite as well as I want them to. Starting with the title-- I see what you're getting at, but to my mind the fantasy you're describing is not quite the same thing as the Ship of Theseus paradox. Close, but not close enough that it fits neatly. I wonder if there's some other analogy you could draw on that fits more exactly to the "whole is greater than the sum of its parts" theme of the poem. Or maybe I'm just being pedantic.

I think your short lines and enjambment choices are not always working for you, leaving you with a few weak lines and ideas divided that don't need to be. Does "But if someone stripped you/ of all the things/ I love/ and gave them to/ a stranger" really need to be five lines? It leaves at least one very weak line ("and gave them to") and several that aren't accomplishing much. Plus there's the deceptive enjambment on "if someone stripped you" which seems like it's saying something that it isn't, and I don't see that the temporary ambiguity is serving the poem (same with "I would have cried" earlier in the poem, btw). Just for comparison, try the same lines but a little longer: "But if someone stripped you of all the things I love/ and gave them to a stranger."

It suddenly occurs to me that the short, fractured lines might be a concrete expression of the themes of the poem, an attempt to make it seem piecemeal. If that's what you're going for, it's a cool idea, but you'll still want to put in the hard work of making each line stand strong on its own and avoid lines that convey deceptive meaning or little meaning at all.

I wonder if the poem is served by the vagueness of "all the things I love." Maybe it is, but have you tried a version where you stay in the concrete and actually describe the things that might be stripped away? Seems like it's worth trying, if only as an experiment.

Apart from that, just watch out for clichés creeping in. The obvious one is "only have eyes for," but the pairing of ghost and machine might also be a needlessly tired way of describing what you're trying to describe.

Thank you for sharing your work. I really enjoyed reading this and I hope you come back to share the next draft. Have a great day!

This evokes the guy I love, who didn't understand it wasn't his trappings bells whistles I clung to, it was the deepest, innermost, HIM

The void especially resonates

At the beginning he said, Love is an abstract concept. I did cry bullshit and named the reasons.

Now, I try to make it an abstract concept. To dismantle it, to dismantle the pain

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I really liked the metaphor you included at the end of the poem. It ties in well with the rest of the poem and was quite a unique description. I would explore further the sentiment of the speaker's attitude to why "love is without reason" is bullshit.

i really like this! especially the beginning, it's such a fun hook for the poem and the pacing works really well imo in those first 5 lines. but after that i think the short lines are really to your detriment and it leaves you with lines like "a stranger," that feel like they don't need the extra emphasis or time.