Feedback time? Oh good.
Super poem, Argie. Very atmospheric. I disagree with most of your line breaks, however... and a few (very few) other points.
Line one. Bills? I wondered what you meant by the word. Obviously not duck bills, nor bills for telephone/eletricity/car service etc. Then it occurred that maybe you mean the US 'bills' meaning paper money (notes, in other words). Wisps of smoke, like ten bob notes, drifting around? Presumably. It's unfortunate to trip over only the second word of a poem, but there you are; you know me -- picky as hell. If you meant some other, totally different meaning of 'bills', you've lost me completely.
Line two, I kept wanting to read as 'long after the retained breath...' but of course that has a different meaning, and I like the slightly unexpected word order of your original.
Lines three and four have end of line rhymes. These need to be internal. Then they'd work brilliantly. As it is, they're intrusive. No need to change any words, just the line breaks.
I don't much like the ellipsis after 'room'. I can see why it's there, but I still don't like it. I'd have used a stanza break instead. Possibly. I don't know.
Then you've got another couple of end of line rhymes, which again, need to be internal, both from the point of view of rhyme and rhythm, as you really don't want to be introducing a 'tee-tum, tee-tum' rhythm.
At the end of the first stanza, 'as your heart was' is a crude construction grammatically (bad to end a sentence with 'was' like that) so you could fix this by simply saying 'like your heart', but then we're wandering into Mills & Boon/ Harlequin romance territory, so maybe not. I'll have to think about that one.
Second stanza: this suffers, even more than the first did, from choppy line breaks that do the poem no favours. You need much longer lines for this one. This delivery here is too staccato; too abrupt for the subject matter.
Lovely ending (apart from the line breaks).
I'll copy and paste the poem here, and show you what I would have done with the lines to achieve more flow. I won't change any words at all. Probably. No. Really. I won't.
Side-effects
Smoke bills drifted around after the long retained breath
hissed out grey and spent and the pungent sweet scent
of stratified palls filled the room...
Connections switched, sensations bewitched us both,
sounds and senses and love; and your mouth
was wide open, gasping, as your heart was.
The heavy silken curtains embroidered in threads
woven from past lives whose ghosts
are still present in the old house
were not enough to stop a golden ray
that crept through a crack in the window frame
and hit me right in the eye:
it doesn't matter if you are here,
nor whether 'tis day or night.
It did, but not now.
Now that's interesting. It's come out in three line stanzas. I wasn't specifically aiming at that, but I think it looks good and works well. Anyway, it's a thought.
Delph
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