[oats]

Timeless: I'm not gonna lie man, I had a really tough time making any sense of this. So it starts off with a hint of the upcoming plan to rob a card game (survival/shady hoax) but then he's in purgatory playing ball with Jesus and Satan, which is of course a dream, then he wakes up to go rob the card game, which is also a dream? And the last three stanzas are all over the place, with plenty of lines that meant nothing to me:

Wrong. Your whole solution is criminally insane, deranged.
That explains the world today in vein, pain is not tamed to behave.

Passerby's go slashing by ontop of a half glass full,

^^both of those, again, just seem like space filler. I kinda get what you were going for, that this poor dude is down on his luck with no other option but to rob a card game, and his co-conspirators betray him (though at one point you said 6 men held guns at him, then you went on to say that it was 4 guys who wanted to kill the other 3), but the bouncing in and out of dream-states didn't work for me, just made it more confusing. The ending after he "died" didn't tie it together or clarify it for me, just continued the dizziness. Sorry if this sounds overly harsh, I read it 4 times and really tried to figure out what was going on, but it didn't work for me. Maybe I'm just an idiot though.

Vivid: this also took me a few reads to get into, but when I did it felt good. I can definitely feel the frustration of not cashing in on your dreams and relegating them to hobby status, and when you have free time you just end up jerking off or fucking around and then hours go by and you haven't done a single thing, and when you're busy you just wish you had more time. Some of the language was clunky, and I wish you would have been more specific (I personally saw this in terms of the dream of being a writer, but that's probably just me projecting), but as is it was a safe drop.

Vote: Oddly enough, I gotta go with Vivid here. I had a tough time getting into Timeless' verse, and Vivid was simple and straightforward, which worked in comparison. Had timeless come with his usual strengths, I think he would have taken this easily, because Vivd's was fairly average, but I think he took a gamble and flopped imo.