[Certain]

Mike Wrecka: I appreciated the head-on approach here, but I think you failed to stick the landing with as much meaning as you had hoped. Part of this was that, even as you described this character's life with plentiful detail, you never gave him a real personality. A lot can be said for changing writer's voice to reflect a first-person narrator, and while the changes don't have to be drastic, some rhetorical device like that could have given your verse more life. The flow was, as always, buttery smooth, and the content was fleshed out and well-executed. But I never felt emotionally invested in this character, and that made the resolution and the entire build up to it less satisfying.

King Ra.: Your writing style is too showy for me, all the way down to how you center your verses and give them offset titles and use bold and italcs. You're going for enormous, which I could appreciate if the actual content of the verses delivered more often. That somewhat happened here. You went for another hugely decadent idea in which you were going to tell us the meaning of life or something, wrapped in codes and ciphers and more, and you struggled to deliver on that profundity with your writing and with your content. Your word choice was smooth and natural, but I expected something bigger for this scope of a story. The same is true of the content. That makes this a tough vote because Mike Wrecka stuck to the basic path, while King Ra. was very ambitious. But my preference is more about execution than anything else.

Vote: Mike Wrecka