Perfect Dusk

[Leah S.]

I have a neat little backlog of poetry here, most of them made since my last two threads here (this is without considering my less serious poem of late, which I don't plan to touch until I'm done with the subject it deals with; education's being a bit of an asshole right now). I've revisited one of those already; I'll revisit the other one sometime soon, with its older, less stringent version as the new edit (I'm a bit stuck with the current one). But for now, I'll go on ahead and present most of my backlog, starting with the ones I'll take the most seriously in revising. 

Sunlight falls all over the world
like the honey-water dripping
from the skin of a ripened peach
preserved in a jar of delight.
It mingles with the soft meringue
of syrupy dew carefully
folded into the heavy cream
of the chilly evening souffle.

I cough into the syrup-drenched
horizon broken by the city
silhouette, a mass of greedy stone
hands with fingers and tumors of steel
mingling their dirty, smoke-spewing tips
with the dusk's perfect confection.

The things I'm most uncomfortable with in this are the volta, which I sort of feel doesn't really work, and the title, which currently is just a placeholder.

I get your extended metaphor, but the whole thing left me feeling odd. Mostly because the sentiment you are expressing is familiar to me and I find it very poignant, and also often produces (in me) a kind of furious grief. I didn't like the comparison of the natural beauty of the world to a sticky sweet dessert that will make you sick if you eat too much of it. Also comparing the skyscrapers to fingers with tumors was okay, but then you had smoke coming out of the ends of the fingers. I've never seen that, and it exploded the metaphor and sent me flying into Who Cares Land. Sorry. A couple more examples: a chilly soufflé would be gross; a perfectly ripened peach does not drip from it's skin, it's rotten peaches that do that, and combining it with the 'jar of perfect delight' left me with the image of a rotten peach in a jar. (Like the kind you would see on shelves in a dark basement in a horror movie.) There's more.... a good meringue is never syrupy, so there's more food grossness. Then there's the turn. You just suddenly cough. So it's all that sticky undercooked meringue that you're trying to clear out of your throat? You have to give your reader some clue in the preceding lines that you are breathing some toxic fume other than burning soufflé. Last, but not least: In the beginning sunlight falls everywhere, but then suddenly at the end, it's dusk. When did that happen?
It occurred to me that this topic might be a perfect vehicle for a haiku, since it's all about an evanescent moment of insight and a perfect example of wabi-sabi. Unfortunately it can't support a full length poem, much less an extended metaphor.