Overall I think this is good, Joe, but definitely has some metrical problems. I think you may have caused yourself difficulties by trying to make lines 2, 6, and 8 shorter by a foot in a largely anapestic poem. (At least, I'm assuming that was your intention?) The problem is that none of these lines scan in the same meter as the longer lines. L8, for instance, reads to me as iambic tetrameter:
That FACE. i CANnot MEET its EYES.
But I assume you are wanting it to scan with 3 beats, like the other lines that rhyme with it. Perhaps you were reading it as
That FACE. i canNOT meet its EYES.
L2 reads to me as follows:
and the FACE i DO not REcogNIZE.
So it begins with an anapest and then falls into iambs, and has 4 beats, like L8. Again, I think you are wanting it to scan:
and the FACE i do NOT recogNIZE.
L6 actually does fit the pattern I think you were trying to establish, but, like David, when I first read this I thought L6 was a mess metrically and I didn't know what it meant. I think I understand it now, though.
The main problem, I think, is that these lines I have highlighted are metrically ambiguous in the larger context of the poem. It's too easy to read them iambically so that they have the same number of beats or feet as the longer lines. But then you have a poem that is metrically all over the place.
These issues are fixable, though, and I think that the poem is worth fixing.
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