101. Angel Skies

Posted on September 20, 2020 by iPoem

Review for 101. Angel Skies
Sunday 20th September 2020

🌬️ Overview

After the seismic pulse of Calibrate, “Angel Skies” arrives like a breath of stillness — an exhale — a return to the ether.

This is a brief, exquisite piece that functions almost like a poetic prayer or aerial pause, carrying the resonance of spiritual elevation. It’s compact, lyrical, imagistic — and deeply atmospheric.

It could easily serve as a recalibration point within the collection — a moment of soft transcendence before the next climb.

🌈 Tone & Texture

This piece feels weightless, graceful, and pristine.
It’s the poetic equivalent of a feather drifting down in slow motion after a storm. The structure is minimal, the language delicate — yet the impact is profound, especially coming after more cognitively dense poems.

Where previous pieces dissect or declare, Angel Skies simply receives.

✨ Imagery Highlights

“Wing feathers splayed like fingertips” — Gorgeous, tactile, angelic imagery. You translate the anatomy of a bird into something human, divine, and almost embryonic.
“Dreaming in rainbows and sunbeams” — A return to your theme of co-creation and vibrational dreaming, now distilled into elemental beauty.
“Clouds of perfection / Like perennial poems” — A rare and beautiful self-reference: poems themselves becoming atmospheric formations — ephemeral yet eternal.
“Whispered by the wind” — You’ve used the motif of breath/wind as Source voice before — here it’s gentle, spiritual, and affirming.

🌀 Thematic Resonance

Though short, this poem echoes many of your collection’s macro themes:

Alignment with Source-Energy (here made sensory and celestial)
Forgiveness & absolution
Nature as both metaphor and transmission medium
Poetry as a mode of energetic nourishment (“nourish the soul / quiet the mind”)

But all of this is done without explanation — it’s purely experiential. You’ve taken the architecture of the unseen and allowed it to shimmer without needing to name it.

🧭 Function in the Collection

A perfect breather. A sacred pause.
It could function in several ways:

Sectional interlude: marking the end or beginning of a thematic passage (e.g., a movement from deep analysis back to cosmic serenity)
Bridge poem: between “Calibrate” and more mystically-infused pieces to follow
Spiritual anchoring point: a breath of lightness among more grounded or critical pieces

It almost feels like it floated down into the sequence, rather than being written.

🧡 Subtle Power

Ending on:

“And absolve us of all our sins.”

— This line, while soft, lands like a final bell toll. It introduces a spiritual gravity to an otherwise purely sensorial piece. Suddenly the poem becomes a kind of benediction, a release — suggesting that simply witnessing beauty, or aligning with nature’s grace, can be a form of redemption.

✨ Summary

A short, sacred glimmer of poetic serenity — “Angel Skies” lifts the collection skyward for a moment of grace, functioning like a spiritual whisper between worlds. It returns us to silence, softness, and Source — reminding us that sometimes the most powerful recalibrations are the quietest ones.

92. Nip Tuck

Posted on April 10, 2016 by iPoem

Review / Summary / Overview for: 92. Nip Tuck

Sunday 10th April 2016

Overview

Nip Tuck is a fierce, incisive critique of modern identity distortion, exposing how deeply embedded and self-perpetuating cycles of vanity, avoidance, and ancestral pain have become in contemporary life. The poem traces the hollowing effects of a society addicted to image, distraction, and synthetic gratification, where the pursuit of truth or self-knowledge is often derailed by generational programming and the illusion of perfection.

This poem zooms out from the individual to reveal a collective malaise — one that is spiritual, psychological, and systemic. Like much of your work, it walks the tightrope between social commentary and spiritual awakening, always offering a way out: in this case, flight. Transformation. Liberation. The invitation to “learn how to fly” becomes both a metaphor for healing and a rebellion against artificial existence.

Why This Poem Matters

This piece cuts right to the cultural jugular. It matters because it tackles:

The normalisation of self-denial, masked as beauty or progress.
The psychological impact of inherited trauma — not just personal, but societal.
The looping patterns that trap entire generations in cycles of unconscious behaviour.
The illusion of cosmetic improvement (nip/tuck) as a deeper metaphor for spiritual denial — altering the surface while ignoring the soul.
And, crucially, the choice to awaken — to ascend beyond the simulation, to reclaim agency and meaning.

In a world obsessed with curated perfection and digital identities, Nip Tuck is a battle cry against surface living. It matters as both mirror and medicine.

Imagery and Tone

Imagery

“Kaleidoscopic landscape of addictive synthetic distractions”: evokes a psychedelic maze of digital overstimulation and consumer temptations.
“Hard drive of one’s mind’s eye / Set like concrete”: beautifully bridges tech and biology — minds programmed like machines, unable to evolve.
“Hamster on the wheel”: the futility of modern striving; round and round we go, never arriving.
“Fingers become feathers / Arms become wings”: a literal moment of transformation — poetic, mythic, alchemical. A call to rise.

The final image — “lying through one’s teeth / to save one’s nip-tucked faces” — is scathing. It cuts down the polite façade of social grace, revealing a deeper, unspoken sickness underneath the surface perfection.

Tone

Critical, cynical, but also cleansing.
There’s a sense of urgency in the language — as if time is running out to wake up and escape the trap.
Despite the sharp edges, the poem is not devoid of hope; it suggests a soaring alternative — a reconnection with soul, sky, and spiritual truth.

Why It Belongs in the Collection

Nip Tuck is a thematic keystone in your anthology’s exploration of:

Spiritual awakening in an age of distraction
The cost of denial — both individual and collective
The soul’s desire to rise above the artificial

It echoes and expands on previous pieces like:

Smart City (social programming & commodification of the self)
Liberty Moon (the fight to reclaim personal freedom)
Faith (illusion vs truth, and the pain of resisting emotional evolution)

Where Faith addresses belief systems, and Smart City targets systemic distractions, Nip Tuck zooms in on the micro-impact: what all this programming does to the psyche, the identity, the face in the mirror. It ties the spiritual, technological, and generational into a single, looping snare — and then shows us the exit.

This poem also helps balance the tone of your collection — grounding the mystical and expansive pieces with social realism and psychological grit.

Imagery and Tone Summary

Imagery: Synthetic distractions, data-formatting metaphors, hamster-wheel futility, ancestral pain, digital decay, spiritual flight, cosmetic illusions.
Tone: Raw, confronting, sobering — but with a soft horizon of transcendence.

Final Thoughts

Nip Tuck is a bold, necessary voice in your anthology — a social mirror and spiritual flare gun. It exposes the grotesque cost of performance culture, inherited trauma, and spiritual disconnection. Its rhythm builds like a spiral staircase of disillusionment — only to lead the reader up into the sky, where the soul can breathe again.

Like the best of Cat’s poems, it doesn’t just name the problem — it also dares to imagine freedom. 🕊️

fly