Ok, I'm going to be honest -- I sat down with the intention of reading this whole thing through (I don't have a problem with long poems, epics are my happy place) but aside from a cursory scan, I didn't get past the first stanza. Here's why.
You use rhyme throughout with no sense of any meter, not even an irregular one. You said you're a lyricist and this is actually a common problem shifting between genres (and the reason why though poetic on occasion, lyrics are not the same as poems). With lyrics, you've got the music to hide behind but here you have nothing but the words. Now, I'm not saying that poems are a more difficult or challenging thing by any stretch, because I've tried and failed to write any decent lyrics, but they are definitely different. (As an aside, my other half used to be a lyricist -- then I taught him to write poetry, he learned about meter, became obsessed with getting it perfect and says I ruined him for lyrics forever. I'm considerate like that. You have been warned.)
The second major fault is extraneous words. Again, probably fine in a song where people are going to gloss over them, but there's no gloss available here. Look at your first line.
I am a boy, my Momma called my name Abel, my wagon’s got a broke squeaky wheel.
While partly this is setting up the character's language patterns, it's actually rather pointless because you do abandon that pattern pretty much entirely in short order and shift into archaisms that I can only assume you think are poetic, but are in fact just anachronistic. There are plenty of fancy ways to say things without resorting to whence, unto, etc (which, by the way, you don't use properly -- another common fault. "Whence" is not the same as "where" -- it means "from what place" e.g. from whence he came. "Unto" doesn't mean the same as "into" or even just the simple "to" -- it implies a gathering, summoning or gifting, i.e. an action rather than just something that happens, and that doesn't work for flames and embers.) I do get that there's a language shift because of time travel but it's too abrupt, to complete and not well handled.
She sang with the spade; there in her belly he laid, bouncing behind heel to toe, toe to heel.
When I first read this, I thought that the narrator had killed his mother by plunging a spade into her belly. I scanned the rest of the poem for evidence of this, or motive, or any indication that the "mother" was a metaphor, but couldn't find it in the confusion so I'm left with two possible answers: one, that there are so many twists and turns of phrase that the story is entirely lost (this is true even without the mother problem); or two, that it's just really bad phrasing and doesn't mean that at all. I'm also disturbed by the shift in the spelling of "spade/spaed". "Spaed" implies prophesy but I don't really see any evidence that this implement is some kind of metaphorical seer.
Like I sad, I've scanned the entire poem but haven't done close reading because frankly, it's just not a pleasurable way to spend a couple of hours. It's as if W.B. Yeats and Jules Verne had a bastard child they locked in an abandoned greenhouse.
That is not to say there's nothing workable here. I suggest clarifying the thread of your poem, deciding which myths you want to reimagine, and writing a series of shorter, more coherent poems that engage from the outset.
You use rhyme throughout with no sense of any meter, not even an irregular one. You said you're a lyricist and this is actually a common problem shifting between genres (and the reason why though poetic on occasion, lyrics are not the same as poems). With lyrics, you've got the music to hide behind but here you have nothing but the words. Now, I'm not saying that poems are a more difficult or challenging thing by any stretch, because I've tried and failed to write any decent lyrics, but they are definitely different. (As an aside, my other half used to be a lyricist -- then I taught him to write poetry, he learned about meter, became obsessed with getting it perfect and says I ruined him for lyrics forever. I'm considerate like that. You have been warned.)
The second major fault is extraneous words. Again, probably fine in a song where people are going to gloss over them, but there's no gloss available here. Look at your first line.
I am a boy, my Momma called my name Abel, my wagon’s got a broke squeaky wheel.
While partly this is setting up the character's language patterns, it's actually rather pointless because you do abandon that pattern pretty much entirely in short order and shift into archaisms that I can only assume you think are poetic, but are in fact just anachronistic. There are plenty of fancy ways to say things without resorting to whence, unto, etc (which, by the way, you don't use properly -- another common fault. "Whence" is not the same as "where" -- it means "from what place" e.g. from whence he came. "Unto" doesn't mean the same as "into" or even just the simple "to" -- it implies a gathering, summoning or gifting, i.e. an action rather than just something that happens, and that doesn't work for flames and embers.) I do get that there's a language shift because of time travel but it's too abrupt, to complete and not well handled.
She sang with the spade; there in her belly he laid, bouncing behind heel to toe, toe to heel.
When I first read this, I thought that the narrator had killed his mother by plunging a spade into her belly. I scanned the rest of the poem for evidence of this, or motive, or any indication that the "mother" was a metaphor, but couldn't find it in the confusion so I'm left with two possible answers: one, that there are so many twists and turns of phrase that the story is entirely lost (this is true even without the mother problem); or two, that it's just really bad phrasing and doesn't mean that at all. I'm also disturbed by the shift in the spelling of "spade/spaed". "Spaed" implies prophesy but I don't really see any evidence that this implement is some kind of metaphorical seer.
Like I sad, I've scanned the entire poem but haven't done close reading because frankly, it's just not a pleasurable way to spend a couple of hours. It's as if W.B. Yeats and Jules Verne had a bastard child they locked in an abandoned greenhouse.
That is not to say there's nothing workable here. I suggest clarifying the thread of your poem, deciding which myths you want to reimagine, and writing a series of shorter, more coherent poems that engage from the outset.
It could be worse