[Certain]

You have shades of David Lynch in your storytelling style. The franticness and bleakness mixes with your writer's voice, which takes on a third-person limited view to further that franticness. Your ambition is enormous in the story but doesn't extend beyond that: Rather than build up a purpose to the story, the story is the purpose here. You also love a MacGuffin, which is a difficult device to use in this format, particularly with line limits in place. This verse stumbles around a bit with plot, and those MacGuffins (the bag of shoes, the Biblical quote and cigarette) reinforced how difficult this plot was to follow. I'm going to break down how I interpretted things and would love if you could correct me or help me to better understand the story presented here. Obviously, that's up to you.

Let's start with what I know: Ben and the O'Malley girl were messing around and murdered viciously for it. Ben was married to Glenda. Amy is a mental patient who escaped and is responsible for the murders, as she became obsessed with Ben and stalked him.

Here's where I'm struggling: Three corpses are mentioned in the story, but one is never clearly described or identified. Amy may or may not be Glenda or someone named Cheryl, who is mentioned only once, near the end. What is a bag of shoes, and why is it so important?

My guess is that much of this story is occurring within the head of Amy, who may or may not be Glenda or Cheryl, as she attempts to figure out all she's done. I did enjoy the mystery of it all, even the bag of shoes. Those little details made the resolution more clouded but the path to it more enjoyable, so I wouldn't recommend you strip down your story too much. I think where you could use the most help is drawing out a plot with a degree of detail before launching into a story. When you're not trying to tell the story (and rhyme on top of it), it's easier to pick apart plot holes and unclear points. The inclusion of the name "Cheryl" simply made no sense to me, for instance.

As a piece of text rap, this verse had a similarly up and down feel. There were too many simple end rhymes, many of which were not helped much by internal schemes. You'd drop off on a multiple-syllable rhyme, then pick it back up later, by which point its momentum was gone. The length of some lines doesn't help.

But there were stretches where the rhyming and writing as a whole was very strong. I liked the first couplet and the stanza beginning with, "She touched the throbbing mess." I also liked the section in which Glenda (or Amy or Cheryl or whomever) realizes what she's done. That was emotionally resonant and a good use of italics, which I generally am not a fan of.

There was a lot going on here, but I've come to expect nothing less from you. In some ways, I preferred the pared down version you used to get under the 48-line limit, as it stripped the ending out. That ending was a challenge because it tossed aside a lot of what we had learned in the verse and made the questions about Glenda/Amy/Cheryl even more obvious. Also, I'm afraid the last two lines were lost on me. They didn't seem like real dialogue, for one, but the doctor's ambiguity kept the door open when it didn't really make any sense to do that.

This was a good verse, distinctly your own. I liked it in many ways, but I was frustrated in others. Thanks for the story.