[James Brancheau]

Hi again, Alex—I googled "New Order" with "movement," to avoid the band, and then I got New Order’s album, Movement, haha. And I tried other search words and still didn’t find anything. So, for now, I'll guess that it’s a militant, perhaps cult-like faction (as their minds are "closed as a barred window"). I don’t know how important it is for the poem re the background on this. Or maybe it’s something I should be aware of anyway…

The "dunks of stone” line I think is much clearer now—I understood it the first time around, but this is more reader-friendly. And I love the change to “message” in the last stanza. And the other changes before the last stanza work well, imo.

I keep going over and over your closing stanza. I love the gist of it, and where the poem ends up, but I’m wondering if sharpening it a bit would be worthwhile. My idea might be to reduce it to two lines and perhaps end it in the general vicinity of “to guide his sketches, color his absence.” In the poem, he is drawing his observations, and “His crayons are the shades of body fluids” suggests, to me, a certain level of brutality, so something like the above might imply the necessity to make something up, make his absence less severe, etc.** For whatever that's worth. As I mentioned before, I think this is great work, and hopefully something here will be of use.

**Added: The above was initially intended to be just an example of something that gets there a bit faster. I got a little carried away...