Esoteric

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

The poem builds its identity through a series of confident declaratives, and that grammatical insistence—the repeated "I'm," "I call," "I walk," "I smoke"—gives the speaker a momentum that suits the subject. The voice arrives fully formed, rooted in specific place and specific sound, and the diction does real work: "yur," "what's goody," "grabba," and the brand-name film references aren't decoration but the actual texture of the world being claimed.

The strongest moment is the turn in the first stanza, where the old people lament a lost generation and the speaker quietly notes that "Their generation made / this one, with the same type of music we make." That observation lands because it doesn't announce itself as profound; it lets the irony sit. The lineation there helps, breaking after "made" so the responsibility hangs for a beat before resolving.

The simile "I shake my locs like I'm ripping a guitar" is vivid and physical, and isolating it in its own stanza gives it room. By contrast, the film-reference stanza feels flatter than the material around it. Naming the movies gestures toward formation and influence, but the lines stay at the level of report rather than image, so the stanza does less than the ones surrounding it. Specifying what those films planted, or what the speaker carried away from watching them so young, could let that stanza pull its weight.

The ending is where the poem's real argument lives. The title and the closing couplet frame the whole piece as a rebuttal—everything preceding it is evidence that this voice is the opposite of esoteric, that it is plain, grounded, communal. That is a sharp move. The risk is that the final lines explain the poem rather than trust it; the word "esoteric" telling the reader how to read what came before. Consider whether the body has already made that case strongly enough that the closing could be even more understated, or whether the irony might cut deeper if the gap between "esoteric" and the lived specificity were left for the reader to feel rather than be told.

One small consideration: the second stanza's "buy a pint to help my body / move like no one's watching" is the one place where the language reaches for a familiar phrase, and "like no one's watching" is well-worn enough to slightly dull an otherwise fresh register. A more particular image of that movement could keep the stanza in the same key as the guitar simile near it.

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This one works for me because the ending flips the whole thing. Nothing here feels esoteric if this is your world, and that seems like the point. It’s only “too esoteric” when someone else decides their references are normal and yours need explaining.