Retro

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

The poem moves through a series of striking, surreal images, and its strongest moments come when those images carry an unexpected internal logic. "The inner mathematics of a raindrop" is an arresting opening — it pairs the precise and the organic in a way that promises a particular kind of attention, and the phrase "stories battered molten" a few lines later sustains that promise with its compression and its odd, forceful verb.

The image of "ten men in green dusters yesterday, all screaming into the same payphone" is the poem's center of gravity. It is specific, faintly absurd, and it carries an emotional undertone of obsolescence and futility that resonates with the title. The follow-up line about "the decades and how they tell you lies" earns its abstraction because it is anchored to that concrete, peculiar scene just before it.

Where the poem is less sure of itself is in the connective tissue between images. Several lines operate as isolated gestures rather than building on one another, and the leaps between them can feel arbitrary rather than associative. "Reckon the knives of Sundays, / Keep hold of them and count to sin" introduces a religious and menacing register that the surrounding lines do not pick up again, so its weight dissipates. One approach worth considering is letting two or three of these images speak to each other more directly, as the payphone and the lying decades already do, so that the surrealism accumulates pressure rather than resetting with each line.

The register also shifts notably at the close. "Tough break" and "I'm fixin' to hear it all" bring in a colloquial, almost wry voice that contrasts with the earlier ornate diction. This could be a deliberate and effective tonal turn — the casual shrug against the cosmic — but as it stands the shift arrives abruptly. The ending might land harder if that vernacular voice were seeded earlier, even faintly, so the jukebox close reads as a return rather than a surprise.

"Bourbon gone extinct on contact" is a fine, economical line, and the jukebox image gives the poem a resting place that suits its mood of looking backward. Tightening the relationships among the images, rather than adding more of them, seems the most productive direction for revision.

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Love the first line, it truly is kinda cool. Like a raindrop is natural, and so for it to be mathematical at the same time is kinda jarring. You're also really good at imagery. I do think it's a bit choppy, so you might consider adding connectors, but if you don't, it still works as is. lovely write! :)

I may need to read a few more times to get the entire meaning, or maybe, with that wonderful imagery,  I'll just love it without understanding completely.  That is a fantastic final line.

Thank you!

Lavender

that some of the metaphors must be personal and not readily attachable for the reader; that is what makes it choppy; maybe a few more pointed similes?
~ Geezer.