[Certain]

timeless: My male-heavy department recently hired two women who seemed a bit underqualified, so I sort of get what you were going for here. (For the record, both have been fine so far at the job, though probably not as good as the one obvious candidate.) This verse was a bit of a step up from most of your recent efforts, but it didn't hit your top peak because the creativity wasn't there.

Yes, the approach was unique, though the police side of things fit squarely in the hero mold. In that sense, this was a good approach to the topic. But the ending didn't land. I liked the phrasing, the clever play on words. But the jealousy angle didn't command enough respect because so little was put into giving us concrete images of everything that happened.

You spent half the verse giving us two background-heavy character sketches and not enough time showing us what all happened. Imagery can do a lot to create emotion, and this story really lacked that. It made the ending feel a little too removed, not cold in the good way but rather unenergized.

Why? It's simple, she had no interest in becoming a cop.
She needed to get sober, wishing this was all a 'one and done' stop.
She knew of 'Bad Boys' and that 'Fresh Prince' guy was her favorite. Other than that,
being a cop to her was getting to drive around, listening to her latest playlist.

I know what you were going for with this, but it came across as stale and silly, particularly the Fresh Prince reference. The rhymes here were bad, too, and I was more interested in the sobriety aspect and less interested in most of the rest of that stanza.

I trained my whole life for today's gold. Feelings measured me-
to be tall enough to kick the world back into an orbit.
With pleasure I remembered I had absorbed the torment.
Days bring gorgeous incentives, night crawls onto my door steps.
Life? I explored it,
at night I mourned it.

This was one of the few sections in the verse where it really felt like you were trying to do something with your writing, beyond the content. That was good, but some of the phrase choices were awkward. I didn't like "today's gold" because it was clumsy, but the last couplet (starting with "Days bring") was particularly underdeveloped. That was an enjoyable turn of phrase but never really found its place in this story.

I still had the night sky-
but my life took 18 years to not even begin to accomplish-
the blood, sweat and tears that pull me under just to drown in nonsense.
My boat capsized, I thought i've done the rounds with 'progress'.
Made it my whole life, and I still add up to less feelings of a hero.
I cleaned the mirror so I can see my stress reeling in more clearer reflections of timed plots.

That's a lot of time spent on the same concept. You had opportunity to tell the story but instead focused on a trite explanation of the emotions on the outside of the story. This section didn't move things forward, it restated what our character was feeling. But if we really knew him, we wouldn't need you to tell us.

Bought a gun and,
as I can recall, I may have pulled the trigger twice.
One for good measure. When asked, "Well, how do you figure?"
I told 'em, "I always aimed for a better life."

The story should have ended here, for sure, as the God stuff really didn't land and the double-denial seemed overwrought. This was clever, again, even though I don't think the homocide was justified entirely. But if you had written the entire verse with this sense of nuance and subtlety, you could have had something stronger.

More writerly elements (intricate phrasing, complex rhyme schemes, unique story pacing or framing) could have brought this up a level. But that wasn't there. Instead the rhymes seemed uncharacteristically sloppy at some points but more often simply boring and straight-forward. That's better than forcing, sure, but the content didn't justify the simple tone. You opened with "I'll be complete," and you did a good enough job with that. But you never brought the intensity to make that complete story interesting.

YDK: You say you stepped out of your comfort zone for this one, and I don't really see it. Sure, the content is far off from what you normally would write. But that same, crisp and reader-friendly but a little too simplistic style pervades this writing as much as anything else we've come to expect from you. The second stanza was more plot-heavy than I'm used to seeing, but the first felt very much like vintage YDK, happening upon a space topic.

What I liked about this most, then, was that you didn't happen upon a space topic. You came up with a very creative approach to this topic that encapsulated all angles of it and sealed your strange ending well. I'm not going to say that ending was completely earned, as the alien presence was rather abrupt and there seemed to be little in the way of nuance in explaining their purpose. But hell, I liked it for the creativity and the dark, dark humor that might not even have been intentional.

My real issue with this verse lies in that first stanza, where almost three-quarters of it is spent repeating the same emotions in different phrasing. You often opt to tell rather than show, and here you outlined the scenario of the space travel without much in the way of hard, small details that could have made the place seem more real. And you also skipped out on the storytelling for most of that stanza, prefering instead to stay within the emotive moment.

Your linear approach to writing, though, made this very easy to follow. After dragging a bit in the first stanza, you moved forward well in the second. And even that first stanza had crisp rhymes and a solid cadence. This verse could be rapped and is easy enough to follow along with that it seems like a storytelling track on an album, albeit not from a particularly great rapper. The limiting factor for you is that lack of the stylistic nuance that makes this text rap topical writing genre different from actually penning lyrics to be delivered.

It's been quiet all night the silence is nerve wracking,
The strange scenes in a desolate landscape I'm reserved; tracking.
Every follicle, molecule is a possible obstacle
to deciphering the code of their biological chronicle.
I see nothing is logical when I'm on an alien planet,
Been abandoned since I landed on this radium; granite.

There are a lot of slightly misused words in this section, but you never lose the reader because you don't clump them all together. To list them: "reserved," "follicle," "chronicle" and "radium; granite" (pick one). Every one of those words was out of place, but that's not exactly abnormal in these leagues. It's still something to consider.

My ship is going to sink! The whole galaxy's despotic!
I realize I'm the alien in this place that God forgot,
But if i die now, my experiment's all for nought.
I often sought to learn from my lonesome trips to space,
But in my last attempt i could vanish without a trace.
I'm just a scientist, astronomer, with many dreams to chase
trying to improve the future for the entire human race...
I feel my rocket tremble, I'm going to die for sure!

This is the section in particular that I was referring to when I said you repeated yourself a lot. All of these words are getting at the exact same emotion without pushing the plot forward.

Silently they gesture me to lay upon a table,
surrounded by what looks to be medical contraptions and cables.
As i approach it they rapidly strap me down to it tight,
And i realize I'm the subject of disecction tonight!

This is your best section because of how clear and clean it is. Even the exclamation point feels very much like you in your element. I called you "earnest" in a magazine recently, and that's what this section portrays. It's a very honest retelling of a completely fictional story.

I left Earth to find a new home as the population grew larger,
but instead of returning a hero I would die as a martyr!
Unknown to my family I had become what I always chased
a sacrifice to science; an experiement in space.

Here's where you tied the topic into the verse cleanly and clearly. And the creativity of the approach really is what pulls you through this battle. Both you and timeless told stories in straight-forward ways with similar flaws. But YDK's rhymes and writer's voice were more polished, making up for timeless' slightly cleaner diction. This battle was close, but the approach wins.

Vote: YDK