[Split]

Originally Posted by El Pancake

She'd strike the piano. The ivory was silk.
Auburn haired. Angry; there was cilantro in every tile she'd pluck.
Allegro, with a twitch of discord as she played the notes
against the smile's she struck ignoring her layered tropes.

"cilantro in every tile she'd pluck." I'm not a fan of this descriptor. Don't you typically cut cilantro? Like, a brief dash of flavor in each note? I think you could've worked this concept harder. The last line is better. Last two lines. They weren't new but they were well-placed.

Painting the keys. The 'Hello Kitty' ironic emblazement
as a stroke against the hedonistic. Punk rock, her sonic displacement;
playing sharp keys in the place of harmonic arrangements,
re-arranging the monotone sonnets she played with.

Okay, cool summary of punk rock/ her attitude.

She's a dream for a catch; finding a note in the meager,
amongst the local parochial seekers. You trying to grasp at a ghost in the ether;
long gone once you realize the soma's aware;
why bother when you've already lost the most that was there, never to better your chances.

Feel like this is dually describing the musician and the narrator's fleeting feelings towards her. Not sure I understand your use of "soma" after I googled it, but I took it to mean a dimension of feeling that has closure. Not like, an initial neural spark but something safely interpolated in one's being.

I think this ending really saved your verse. The last two lines really fill out the atmosphere of the music & connect the musician to your narrator. Really cool adventure into the psychiatry of relating heavily to music.


[quote]

Originally Posted by Eŋg

_carpe diem

Disturb dust on a summit’s peak as I blush from a cutting breeze,
disrupt each shoulder holding the burden of allies, and lies,
past lives crushed under bloodied feet: heart thumps (a drummer’s beat).

I liked the imagery of the opening. Shrugging off the chill of a burden. "Allies and lies" was a bit rough.

Cardiac movement’s hardly that prudent - exuding lust if lovers sleep.
My spirit is hungry; stomach’s weak: untouched by the coming feast.
Glories of yester-yore are ineffective gauze - hesitant lips caressed a
desolate jaw (it was never much more) - a present exists: at best the
rest is thought. Schematic, presuming you can plan, mentally,
a pattern’s renewing as ancestor’s hand gestures span centuries
but one’s path isn't proven.

In the first three lines of this section I'm wanting more clarity. More directness. You're speaking thickly in metaphors. Looking back at the opening, I feel the "burden of allies and lies, past lives crushed under bloodied feet" and "[hunger for] the coming feast" are temporal uncertainties left unresolved. And "at best a /present/ exists, at best the rest is thought" is meant to tie these austerities to the undercurrent of anxiety in the verse. It feels dissonant, so far.

The last line is well written but a little empty, for me.

It's not that this figurative language is badly done, at all. But I do feel that here your writing is unnecessarily contorted. Anxiety for the future and worries borne by the past aren't very nuanced in and of themselves, without some characterizing struggles or doubt. Im left asking "for what?" in the face of an archetypal and vague existential crisis.

My mantra is brief: Man’s meant to be.
I exist in the now, the air whips with a sound my mind garners,
to live in the past or look to the future’s stasis, so why bother?

I like the callback to the mountain wind, a cool trick to show that all of this deliberation has taken place in the moment.




I think that each had a valiant attempt to embody a topic that essentially requires you to distance yourself rom the reader. Neither went the very easy typical route of some dude being like "life is lame the end."

I think Eng had the much more consistent verse, Cake achieved more conceptually/ thematically. There was a real satisfying sense of closure to Cake's verse despite how aloof it was descriptively. Eng was much better with wording and rhymes, but didn't cover any new ground. For all the description he put into the past and future, he concludes by telling us he is completely unchanged. Perfectly fine, but the concept is far from a new one (even for him) and I feel it fell flat as a result. Cake, too, fell back into old habits & familiar walks for his verse. Music metaphor/ wordplay, woman she cute wanna buy her drinks but shes too perfect as im rape-eyesing her from across the street in the back of my car with binoculars. Listening to music feeling things you can barely grasp hipster music my hands are literally only made of fingertips feeling satisfied even though none of my verses blossom into healthy relationships wiping off my cavaliers seats with a banana peel


In the end, though, Cake captures something more fleeting and more raw. The "why bother" that he settles into is tense, dynamic: a hammock to sink into that is pulled taut by many trees growing in different directions. It's in the woods right outside your house, and bit of a hassle to climb into it, but the view is surprisingly rewarding. Eng takes us on a hike up a foothill behind the CVS, and then we set up a tent, zip it tightly shut and then play GameBoy until our parents make us roast marshmallows or something.

V/Cake.