Fine, I will teach.

First principles.
To those who cannot see beauty or distill a grain of truth from what is otherwise white noise:
The best writing is the most directly functional.
But function may dictate that flowery imagery be used to convey that truth.
Flowery imagery should not be used if unneeded, nor should rhyme.
Rhyme should contribute to the power of a piece but should never undermine its meaning.

Let's look at a specific poem.
1 Everything is too sad
2 reviving dreams I once dreamed like a child
3 gardens and hikes and basket lunches
4 have turned into flavorless melon cups
5 in scrubbed auditoriums
6 all the good I wanted to do
7 split into two, thrown back into the sea
8 my friends have abandoned me
9 and my feet are moving
10 but I'm not going anywhere.

1. To whom? The author? Or some non-authorial protagonist? It appears to be the author. The choice of "too" sad rather than "so" sad indications a threshold has been exceeding; something can be expected to happen.

2. The present sadness brings back a time I once dreamed "like" a child, not "as" a child. So the sadness of other childlike states, like my post ECT days, perhaps. The childlike nature is almost more tragic if it occurred in an adult state, since this means I was emotionally out of control at the time, and adults don't relinquish emotions easily.

3. Now the source of the childlike dreams is revealed: Gardens and hikes and basket lunches. This is undoubtedly the period of time I spent living with Taunya, when we (she) had a garden and things seemed homey and there were invigorating hikes up Mt. Hood with basket (sack) lunches to enjoy at the peak. This is obviously a good and cherished memory.

4. But at some point (the present?) the vision of these mountain feasts fades and is replaced by the artificiality of a prepackaged melon cup. This could be from an institution, where such things are common, or it could be from from a convenience store, where prepackaged "health food" is increasingly sold at premium prices.

5. Scrubbed auditoriums gives the impression of an institutional environment, and I doubt in this case it's a lecture at Stanford. Especially the choice of the word "scrubbed" suggests to me a residential facility of some sort, such as a mental institute, which is a bit of a leap but seems to fit where the poem is headed.

6. What good did I want to do? It's not specified, but in MY case it would be to produce more serious scholarly work, to make people more happy, to raise and maintain a stable and healthy family, and so on. Other people seeing themselves as the protagonist will come at this with their own ideas of benevolent longings.

7. The point is, whatever the nature of the longings, they are quashed. I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that the type of Baltic sturgeon that produce black caviar, the world's most valuable, can be afflicted by a certain blight (no doubt after drinking lots of that good Russian sewage) which render their roe (caviar) spoilt and thus at dock when they are split open, if such a defective specimen is found, it is cast aside (perhaps into the sea, or into a junk pile).

8. My roe is no good; my dreams were soft and rotten and deemed unsuitable for public consumption. My friends do not come to my aid at this. It is not clear from this poem why; perhaps the fault is in my stable of friends, or perhaps I have done something to finally reveal my own folly. That may be a weakness of this poem, the lack of motive for people close enough to the protagonist to be considered "friends" to abandon him or when his dreams are revealed as untenable fantasy. Maybe they were practical friends who thought he was a visionary as opposed to just a dreamer.

9. My feet are indeed moving. Usually this is a good thing - it indicates action, a heading toward some resolution. But...

10. The moving feet are not in fact taking me anywhere. They are flailing about in the absurd dance the hanging man does when he's kicked the chair away and is supporting his weight by his neck alone. Assuming the neck does not break, this means probably a blocked trachea and the equivalent feeling of holding your breath too long but with no possibility of ending the feeling, which grows more and more dire until consciousness gives way to darkness. And all the while, the feet dance in the air, strangely beautiful and powerless. It is the dance of death.

I don't mince or waste words, lines, or poems. I write efficiently in my own way, and can probably explain nearly every poem I've written in the last decade in this manner. I think it's a boring thing to do, but I want the less sophisticated poetry reader to be assured that I personally approve, as it were, of every word that goes into one of my poems, and none (at least in this blog) are treated as throwaways or "sing-song". I don't write poetry to create pleasant sounds. The fact that many sound pleasant when read aloud or silently gives me great satisfaction because despite putting the pure meanining of the poem ahead of all else, I've managed to also accomplish this secondary goal, and that is not an easy thing to do. That's why I enjoy doing it.