amalgamated

Wow, I really don't know where to start with this piece, there's just so much in it and I hope I'm not overanalyzing (though I do enjoy that). But I'm going to indulge in a long careful analysis and I hope you don't mind.

The style reminds me of Sylvia Plath, and since I saw a quote by her in your signature I'm guessing I'm not completely off on that inspiration. It also reminds me of an (also 'Plath-onic', so to speak :rolleyes poem I wrote myself. The image portrayed there is of two people lying in bed, one is in a fetal position that resembles that of a shrimp, seeming to want to climb into the womb of the other one. 'fetally challenged' recalls this very female attraction to security through motherhood, regardless of who is the mother - could be a boyfriend, a random father figure, herself, and so forth. That's what I'm sensing is going on here, she's in an extreme need of security through a relationship which she can't make to exist. There are two romantic counterparts, a 'you' and a 'he', and it seems like the same fetal desire is directed at both of them. Her idolatry can be more general too and refer to a habit of getting obsessed with people, platonically as well, in a desperate need for some kind of affection.

'amalgamated.
cerimoniously draped in
clandestine pools of heat.
the lure of your pillow
keeps me awake in
this conundrum of silence.'

This is wonderfully phrased and sets the mood, an intense silence of hidden tension. The 'I' controls herself (I'm assuming it's a woman since the emotions are so feminine), but everything is raging below the surface. She seems a bit like a tiger ready to jump, almost hypnotized, in the way that the pillow is described as a lure, it gives an animal feel. The silence actually doesn't seem to be a conundrum at all. It seems like the person has been through it before and knows that it's not love or anything like it. Knows that she's going to be rejected when the other person wakes up.

I don't understand why she feels callous? It doesn't seem like she does on the inside. Maybe 'feel' could be replaced by a different word, or maybe 'callous' could, though I would then suggest another word I have to look up. I really love it when poems have such unfamiliar words, it not only expands my vocabulary (which is not as big as my Danish ditto), but shows the same natural love for the language in itself that I have. All its words deserve to be used, especially in poems and especially the long fancy ones.

'sends slivers up my spine' is simply a wonderful wordplay.

'he told me i had to give up
my life of idolatry--
i can't,
i have my geraniums to
look after.'

This posesses several meanings to me. The geraniums, or flowers in general, have something to do with romance, being here a metaphor for the idolatry of specific people that she indulges in. It can also mean that she sees her life of idolatry as the only possible life, which means that to give it up she would have to die, and she can't do that, because then who would look after her geraniums? Also showing that she mothers these flowers, because she has nothing else. (My advice to her is to get a dog, I'd say cat but there's too much prejudice connected with cat-ladies . Just kidding.)

'instead, i held him close to
control the distance between us.
this feeling wasn't love, though it
did surge up from the
soles of my feet.'

In this part, possibly combined with the previous one as well, I think the language loses some of its compressed elegance of imagery. The text is good, just maybe needs to be fused with some of the more tight imagery to keep the same flow/pace as the rest. 'this feeling wasn't love' annoys me a little bit. I can't quite put my finger on why. Possibly because I've learned that if you want to write a brilliant poem about a subject, a specific word, you don't mention that word once in the poem. But please take that with a grain of salt, because I'm going into extreme detail out of sheer excitement that you wrote such a tight poem.

'prosaic.'
Just wonderful. *applause*

'we built bridges of crescent moons
that lasted until morning.
my tightly held sense of order
crumpled in on itself.'

I can easily picture a crescent moon as a bridge, but bridges of several crescent moons is a trickier image. But since it's bridgeS I guess every bridge consists of one moon? I like the idea of them lighting up in the night, so much brighter on earth than they could be in the sky. And the obvious point that the moon can only last for one night. But the moon will come again, or another moon can take its place, if you will, so there's hope in the building of bridges. But it seems like that hope has crumbled.
The last two lines (what would they be called in poetry lingo? I only know poetry lingo in Danish and I'm eager to learn) again remind me of the shrimp poem. They also point to her neurotic tendencies, which are very obvious at this point.

As for punctuation, form, and such, there's not much to say except that it's good. I like the fact that you didn't spell i with a capital letter, because the I of the poem is hardly even there, as she focuses very much on others and seems not to be able to be independent. She's more like a parasitic creature.