This doesn’t feel like a poem to me yet. The properties I note below, though not individually disqualifying, are hard to overcome in combination: - The register is casual. - There’s little figurative language. (Just the metaphor in S4?) - There’s redundancy in the text. For example, S4 could be cut down to this: > The town for them was something to possess, > like a prize for the largest swine > at the county fair. - There’s no turn. - There’s little sense of form: no symmetry in the stanzas, no anaphora or epistrophe, no received meter. - There’s little sense of heightened attention to sound: no alliteration, no assonance, no rhymes. Again, not every poem has to do all of this. My other note is on the line breaks: they all lie either at punctuation or major syntactic boundaries, which comes across to many experienced poets and me as monotone. (Sometimes, though, that’s the right choice, most notably for me in the work of Ai. If you read her poems, consider yourself on content notice.) The first comp that comes to mind in terms of technique is Bob Hicok. I don’t love his stuff, but I think he succeeds by leaning much more into the weirdness of his material.