coincidence

[matsunosuperfan]

Distant connection,
Illusory closeness.

Against my will, 
I grow numb. 

Hints flickering slight-
of an infolding road.

Keeping my feelings away,
While our dim eyes won’t meet.    

Despite it —

You look more than jolly.
It still makes me feel sick, 
And yet content.

Some meaningless words, 
I can’t control this moment.

The loss passing through me.

You’re gone. 

I move. 

I can get down with the sentiment. The execution at present leaves much to be desired, I think. Someone said "expository" - co-sign hard. The poem is at present mostly just "telling it like it is," which is to say, it's fairly flat and directly editorial. The speaker seems to mostly explain how they feel in no uncertain terms. The instinct that poetry should complicate or reconfigure lived experience is present, but manifests as scattered vagueness, as if to compensate for too much "telling" by counterbalancing with flashes of obscure allusion. This strikes me as a common impulse and one to be closely watched. 

My suggestion, speaking with my usual unearned conviction: rethink the project with regard to syntax. Much of the way sentences are forming and utterances are emerging here feels familiar to me - the dreaded "I wrote the poem this way because something in my mind has learned this is what poems should sound like." The unattached absolute phrases - "hints flickering," "keeping my feelings away," "The loss passing through me." These structures give the piece an airy quality, and combined with a lot of abstract nouns (will, feelings, control, loss) the effect for me is that I badly want more concreteness to latch onto. 

I can't name the occasion, and the subject feels overfamiliar - these are the foundational concerns I would move to address first. 

Tonally, we seem to be dangerously close to the hinterland of "emo." I run into this problem a lot myself when I turn to similar subjects, so I empathize.

I think this poem is gesturing to a lot of significance that right now, only the speaker and the presumptive addressee really have access to. The reader is left on the outside looking in, understanding that something significant has happened, but mostly disoriented as to what that is and what to make of it. Give us more of that interiority of feeling, preferably by way of particular image and tangible figuration, and we'll have an easier time climbing on board and going along for the ride.