Poetically speaking, this is good. It has form, unusual expression, metaphor (I think), and harks of Frost. For those reasons, I'd vote 10. But the reason I did not, and did on Elderking's recent one, is that the best poem, in my faulty opinion, is not the best written, it's the Trojan Horse that smuggles titillation into my sheltered life. Not sexual titillation necessarily, but connection with myself. Yours does that as I feel the tiger's caged existance, and I think you're hinting at more, but what?

Maybe you mean it as metaphor, but I doubt it. Seems an old man would ponder Jordan's River and wish he'd been read, absorbed, and written. Instead, he's just tried to make facinating and new what was neither. Elderking's recent poem is like this in feeling.

Tree of Life could be from Genesis and Eden, or it could be the evolutionary tree of species. I go with the latter, but it's vague.

Dusel is one of those easy-to-be-bored-with party yuppies that spoil most parties with fluff and smirk at poets, and are the reason I seldom go to parties anymore, unless they're about something more. I'm surprised you didn't point out the poets' disruptive potential, unless you're saying they're the complicit kind who are no different from Dusel.

You have a worthy subject for a poem, and in some ways it's a good poem as written. I say this because it's poorly constructed and incompletely thought out, which reflects the key line, "I used to be deep but something happened."

Cute, though wordy, title. But the poem is not cute, but sad, arguing therby with the title.

Could it be that a book written by many authors, over some 600 years, in different times and cultures and in different languages, and then translated into english from several manuscripts of questioable origin, would agree internally in every case? The amazing thing is that it holds together as well as it does.

You've given in to a popularized box called life. There's more out there than you say.

Thinking about the Bible, and Michael D’s flight to skid row or someplace, and your wonderment about Bukowski’s stint there, and alchemy's great summary of Michael D's brief stay, where else is anything both as succinct and as early as this:

“The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.”
Ecc. 9:11 NIV

God>Solomon>Bukowski>god'swife

The meter is not so steady in this that you need devices like "ne'er" to maintain it. And why "learnt" not learned? The cross/toss rhyme seems unnecessary where rhyming is not the pattern. Likewise "'morrow." These poeticizing attempts only detract from you free style which has its own kind of poetry.

A flurry of great lines, and then the ending. Who is Lorelei? A mystical, colorful, and sad read.

May I rent one of the forgotten rooms in your delightful-sounding house? It must be a fine place to thrash through the sewers looking for all the lost keys I've swallowed.

She hasn't much to send him, or much to buy it with, and when the baby comes, she'll have less. Still, her poems he passes 'round, and keeps the whale's picture she found the money to sponser. "What a woman!" I hear him say.

I must be crazy to say this conveys anything, but except for her being "teen to b" it does.

This would be a 10 if it made less sense.

Some good lines, but they're mixed with ramparts of regret and other concludable free form fixations.

And, speaking for the forum, we do forgive - forgive "a myriad" when myriad would do, forgive that you mean "myriad words." But I lit this, the thought of it.

Etherial indeed. It sounds like a priestess exerting her influence over a penitent follower. I don't know why she keeps saying "I do not need" or variations of it, as if the priestess is uncertain of her abilities and needs to keep reassuring herself.

lol. It took me awhile to get the "awl" but it works. "a martyr" should be "martyrs."

I like CS Lewis on the use of imagination. His image of the lion in Narnia, for example, came as a dream, but he developed the image, the character, beyond the initial vision using logic and allusion. Your duck walking on ice, and confused by the image of walking on water, is ready, as think you might be implying, to make something poetic and meaningful from that experience.

"Free spirits caged on a pedestal" - great line.
"masques" I think you mean
"with twice sung hymns" grammar
Married to God implies a num, but the preceeding seem like a human marriage.
the title seem too descriptive, too blunt.