~ For one, you really capture the concept of hyper-vigilance—"He must live every day watching the rope, / testing his grip, / containing the fire." This is a skill that is a two-edged sword. It is interesting that you mention fire in this metaphor, because constant hyper-vigilance can burn a person out. Been there, done that, unfortunately. I really felt that line; great wording.

~ "He must hold the beauty...while honouring the danger..." Super-zen concept here! Everything is this/that, black/white, give/take...beauty/danger. I love the concept of "honouring" the danger. That's even better than respecting it. Double-marks on wording again!

~ "Love is not just a feeling but what you do to prove it..." I mean, if this was an essay, this would be the thesis, plain and simple. It's a way of phrasing this I remember, because it's so bottom-line fundamentally true. This is how poetry can distill the most complex statement into a few words. Lovely!

~ "Is love treating someone like a King or Queen / Or is it being there when you need each other the most..." Leigh, this almost ended my marriage. I put my wife on a pedestal. But after about the first decade of our marriage...we could not longer reach each other. We've been trying to close that gap for 15 years now. This line hit deep. Because we have to think about how we love, don't we? I mean, that's another main thrust of this poem—love's not just an action, it's a method.

~ "You paying attention to the smallest detail about someone might mean more than you taking them to fancy places..." The truth in this line haunts me. I am terrible at remembering details, and I know it hurts my wife's feelings. It has been a problem between us for the reason you state here. Remembering the little things each day is more important than remembering one big thing once a year.

"He's a rather eccentric, though erudite, fellow, eh?"
         vs
"Dude's wicked smart, but he's weird, y'know?"

~ A lot of unnecessary words can be removed and phrases concentrated to make it poetry.

~ Line breaks could be removed and imagery enhanced to fit better as prose.

~ Concise grouping of paragraphs and a general thesis could make this a nice essay on the plight of the artist.

~ "a very Canadian Riot." How exquisitely delightful that short phrase is. "Sorry, I was just going to throw this stone, but that wouldn't be terribly polite. Excuse me, I just need jostle to the left a bit—sorry! That was your foot, beg your pardon..."

~ "I said goodbye to my naked hosts..." Again, we live in a very repressed society now, and nudism is taboo to many. So the image of casually waving farewell to an unashamedly group of stark naked people is so jarring, one has to laugh; there’s simply no other way to process it.

~ I am guessing American English is not your native language. There are a lot of clues in sentence misconstruction and other grammar mistakes. I'll point to a few, but I'm not going to rip your narrative apart.

~~~RAFA: "Now at this point the highway was blasted through the Great Canadian Shield, through great granite ridges, which presented excellent opportunities for sleeping when darkness began to fall."

            By reworking and removing unnecessary words and phrases, thsi sentence can be made clearer and cleaner:

~~~JEFFREY SUGGESTION: "The highway was blasted through the Great Canadian Shield here, through great granite ridges, offering excellent impromptu camping sites for the night."

~~~RAFA"Setting out involved walking to the edge of town and standing by the side of the road, thumb extended, waiting for some generous driver to stop for me. In such manner I made it, after many hours out of Nova Scotia, and into the neighboring province of New Brunswick."

            Could be pared down to:

~~~JEFFREY SUGGESTION:    "We hitchhiked easily with several generous motorists all the way to neighboring Nova Scotia like this."

Rupali: "You're a prisoner here. You don't know your crime, but you're here until you die. Deal with it."
American Poet: "You were born; finish the job."

~ "...An art major. She taught me; / I dabble."

~ "Why did I love someone who scolded me..."

~ "...she was petite and slender, / and was cold-natured...that last time, Her figure was cold and inert..." We think someone is cold-mannered in real life, but we find what is truly cold when they lie in state before us.

~ "Skin-colored stone." What an incredible way of keeping life in death. It's so perfect, I am somewhat at a loss to explain why.

~ "She'll be eighty-five, now and always." These lines about ages are exquisite. They are almost pedestrian in their individual simplicity; but when taken as a whole, they make the reader catch their breath and sigh. "Now and always..." Wow.

~ "It’s not about joy. / Joy’s been chewed to pulp, / sold a thousand times in pretty colors / to people too scared to bleed for real." When I try to explain poetry to people, or let the read my poetry, they don't get this. "Where are all the sunrises and sunsets? The pretty love notes?" Yeah...no. Stanzas like this make me know I'm not alone.

~ "Grinning masks / kissing their own reflections..." Oscars, Grammy's, CMA Awards. That's the phrase I've been looking for. Sometimes I wonder if that's what this site is all about, getting pats on the back and gold stars in our portfolios. But then I see a poem like this that challenges the reader. Readers want puppies and God and rainbows. But in the words of Ice-T: "s*** ain't like that! it's real ****ed up!!!"

~ "Every day / feels like a war." I finally found a medicine regiment that helps with that feeling. For reasons other than yours, no doubt, the last 14,600 days have been little wars. Struck me right through the heart.

~ "I’ll claw through the dark / with these cracked hands, / until the dirt tastes like truth." Dark, brother. Dark. I'm lucky; I've come to live with the shame and call it a scar. Sometimes it still bleeds though. And sometimes I scratch at it until it bleeds.

I don't use a template. Imagine us sitting at a table in a cafe/bookstore, notes and books all over the place, just swapping stories and poems for the joy of writing and reading. Maybe a mug of tea or coffee to hand. The conversation you can imagine at that table is how I review. I apologize up front if it skips around or gets convoluted.

I was afraid, at first, it was going to be another example of the curiously popular trope of someone growing to 20 or 30 feet tall and making everyone do what they want them to do—a trend that makes no sense to me yet. Instead, this is about your self-confidence growing stronger and your struggle to grow beyond the mental and emotional constraints in which you have been forced to grow. "My metaphorical backbone is stronger than your actual misguidance!" The title is a brilliant 1-line declaration of positive self-realization.

...so aptly describes outgrowing the narrow-minded and narrow-sighted confines of church-based religion and family life. This is not to say religion or faith or spirituality are altogether negative—just the theocratic oppression of an organized Church. The "house that seemed too big" works equally well for a church—physically as well as metaphorically—and a family home. ...now myself, with the face of a pig / a mind of a lamb, / but a life made of sin. The realization that Church is not adequate leads to implied labelings by others as someone dirty and unworthy of the establishment anyway.

I can also see this working without the connotation of Church, but it feels so right, such a good fit, I'm sticking with that part of my interpretation. I trust you'll tell if I'm way off base.

...we see a house that is definitely familial. "Mother is the name of God on the lips of all children." Brandon Lee said something very close to that in The Crow, and it is true. So Mother and Father equating to Jesus and Mary (I was raised Catholic, up to the age of, oh—the age of reason!) is a nice transition back to the physical plane from the spiritual. "...Walls my mother built" is very referential to Pink Floyd's "Mother" that one wonders if there was an influence there. "like birth, I tear through all the lies I've lived...in a place where fruits fall to the soil / where in silence, I hear not song..."

What a heartbreaking scene. I've seen it so often. My own mother eased back from the religion thing when I hit my tweens. She maintained a beautiful personal faith, a pure personal relationship with her perspective of God, but she no longer constrained me by it. I was lucky, I know. But I dated a girl—a Mormon—and she was crushed by traditions and regulations. These lines capture the essence of the poem so well, which seems to be: I so much am more than I am allowed to be that the only way to survive is to self-realize. And so...

The speaker performs some objective introspection and finds...well...I'm not 100% sure. This is the only area of the poem that is murky for me. I'm not sure if the speaker is finding rot within himself or if he is finding what others would see as rot. I rather think a bit of both, based on the subsequent text, but it's a but murky.

...are the action stanzas. No more remembering and thinking and examining: now is the time to break out, to stand up, to self realize! —Or to stay bowed, but burn the walls down around oneself. As I read this, an analogy forms in my mind: the poor black kid from the inner city fighting and scratching his way out of stereotypes and prejudices to become a successful lawyer that defends other poor black kids in the ghetto; or one that chooses the other path, walking into those classrooms and offices of prejudice and constraint with a Mossberg and letting lead fly. "I hope there is in me, / a desire for violence..."

But it's not all about anger and acting out. Self-denial and self-destruction are tasted as well. "I step into a fiery fit of violent fumes / and hope it buries any trace of madness..." The desire to be something else as an alternative the effort to be true to himself, the speaker hopes to be "Something big, angry and strong / something that isn't disgustingly me" and to perpetuate the cycle of violence and abuse: "to take others' freedom and be free."

...a beautiful step on the journey to positive self-realization. "I will see only myself in my reflection, / not my lost childhood in my eyes..." The speaker recognizes that the qualities of himself are adequate, that his needs are defined within himself and not defined by the implied neglects and mental abuses of his parents, that what he has gone through without lashing back has made him stronger than if he had gone thugnasty on the place. He realizes that stiffening his spine, having the backbone to stand against what was and become what should be is the ultimate revenge he could ever find.

~ "...he didn’t feel left behind." Surviving the dead is painful, and this is one emotion I'm lucky to have never felt. As I said, Dad and I were estranged, and Mom and I had time to make our peace and prepare for her passing. But the abrupt departure from a sudden event. I'm lucky to have never known it, but not hard-hearted enough to not feel it in writing like this.

~ "There were bills, and promotions..." The passage of time is so mundane. I had to tell me children as they grew up, not understanding why things got less exciting as they entered their teen years, that life is routine punctuated by brief moments of ecstasy, not the other way 'round. As Eliot' Prufrock puts it: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." Beautiful way to put us there in the middle of a reality we can all identify with.

~ "Evan had bought a simple black bike; nothing flashy." I wonder if choosing the color of mourning was deliberate by the author? I also notice it is not flashy, implying that, consciously or subconsciously, Evan did not want upstage the gift his father had gotten him so many years ago. So much can be said with so little. Very nice. (Aside: does the flash fiction you write help you to find layered economic with words like this? Or is it just writers' intuition?)

~ "...well, Evan just rode." Forrest Gump ran in order to heal. Evan rides. It's the forward motion that counts, that helps us move past the numbness and fear, to learn how to remember to live while accepting the grief and finding that it's not too hard to live with it after all.

~ ...but she killed the bastard. This seems too abrupt and direct compared to the rest of the piece. Perhaps alluding to his death would be better. I don't know, it's hard to rearrange stuff in a flash, isn't it?

~ This is most important. You make that font for the notes after the story bigger. Highlight them. Make them seen! The story's great; the awareness is greater, and I thank you for putting git there. Domestic violence disgusts me, and when it involves children, it incenses me.