[oats]

Black: the first time I read this last night, I must admit I didn't see strong ties to the topic. I was also pretty tired, and pretty high. Re-reading it again this morning, it's much more apparent. I like how you took the angle of law to be physical laws as opposed to legality. That definitely is more up my alley personally, but also I think it's a more interesting approach. The inner-monologue of rapid-fire imagery was dope as usual, and I loved how dreams are described as our escape from physical limitations (loved the bit about destiny denied due to our skeletal shape). Mid-verse when you started to compare the chains of physical law to the chains of expectations really rounded out the concept for me - sure, maybe preconceptions like that are not "law," but they certainly behave as such, since we tend to mold ourselves according to what others expect of us. What I enjoyed most, however, was that there's an undercurrent of hopeful angst that balances out the emotional resonance with the intellectualism that seems to come most natural for you. Although more rested, sober oats can see the connections much more vividly, there are still spots that seemed to meander a bit, and if there is any flaw I can point out it would be that perhaps there was too much being juggled here to be adequately explored. Then again, your writing pulls it off because there are so many ways to dissect. Airtight verse, really.


Witty: What stuck out to me last night was how on-point your rhyming was. Very impressive display of storytelling through complex schemes, to the point it was almost distracting lol. That's not a fault of yours, of course, but just a way to say that it was immediately identifiable as a strong spot of your verse. The first two stanzas place us in a pretty solid world, and the foundation for the narrative is all in place. Top notch writing. But there was a really sudden transition between stanzas 2 and 3 that threw me off. I get the effect of creating such a rigid contrast, but it didn't add up to me - why was this person, of such pure values and ambitions, being tortured? This was never really answered at all. The final 3 stanzas were rife with those kinds of moments. I didn't understand why he was in that situation, and I didn't have enough info on the character himself or his people to really make a connection with his plight. From my vantage point, it looks almost like you got lost in the rhyme schemes and neglected your story a little bit. The writing was really high-level, as good as anyone's I've seen, but as a story it was under-developed.

Vote: Black. Both dope, but Black just out-performed conceptually.