[Julie Steiner]

Hi, Alex!

Iff I'm not completely misreading this myself, I think I can suggest some things that would help readers find their footing faster.

First, swapping S1 and S2 might clue us in faster. Then the poem would begin with "Call me the Maker" — a slight echo of Melville's Moby Dick. [Edited to say: If that sends too many readers down the rabbit hole of thinking that the speaker is God, you could recast all the first-person singulars as first-person plurals, starting with something like "Just call us makers."]

Some suggested tweaks for that stanza:

Call me the Maker. Just call us makers. Yes, my work What we do is pain-
staking. It’s danger-filled, . The production rate,
vexingly slow. You might not deem Some label us insane
with such devotion to what I for how we love the wonders we create—
labeled as crude condemned as "death machinery" by most
who claim to know,. eEspecially your smug
experts. We strive to win, at piddling cost!           >>> Maybe something like elites. But those who blink have always lost.
Thus, I Yes, we revere this our craft, be it a bug
dispersed to hosts or just a retooled slug.

For the other two stanzas—generally, the meter will sound less robotic if you don't drop unstressed syllables like "a" and "the" where they would ordinarily be. We readers have to believe that this narrator is a real person, and that the rhyme and meter just happen to coincide with natural speech patterns, effortlessly. Usually the meter can handle the variation of an extra unstressed syllable here and there.

I don't think the "Cain" / "cane" parallel works. Yes, Cain killed Abel, but since in Genesis there is no mention of a weapon, the idea that weapons manufacturers can claim this as part of their industry's rich history is pretty dubious. Also, mentioning the fondness of this field's practitioners for disguised personal weapons seems like an unhelpful tangent, since those gadgets don't seem to fit with the more large-scale weapons that the narrator seems fascinated with creating. (Besides, can't every cane stun?) In my opinion, that real estate in the poem might be better used to claim that the defense industry is a noble and necessary pursuit that advances the public good, etc.

Off to meetings now....