[Eŋg]

splitty - interesting. you're so off-kilter, sometimes, i wonder if it's more for projected effect than a product of your nature. you rhyme more than i remember you doing, which is cool, and you're unorthodox - letting the thread of the bedside rhyme dangle before tying a knot in it with senpai - which i thought should have been kohai, incidentally. you had two typos in your verse, i'm not docking points from them, just saying. i'm not so sure 'semblance of close' works, practically, but it sounds cool. there's an anxious uncertainty manifested in a passive and resigned individual. i'd say the bedside/beauty and sad little photo i stashed/polaroid photo attached (coupled with his patently nostalgic attachment to it) most likely allude to a former lover. it wasn't thinly veiled, it rarely is with you, but i still feel that's a bit of an obvious interpretation on my part (and your direction). did you actually allude to black? i really thought you did, lol. regress into the cure of a cancer fucked up the cadence of your piece for me, but it was a transient hiccup amid some curious writing. coalesce -> impending develop was line of the battle. that was a dual threat, with the first being the image of a wonderful paradox, and the second a superb wordplay given the context. the sombre, reflective and self-destructive tone seemed earnest and weighted what could easily have been an airy piece. you built a condition in a microversed sphere of existence to centre on the attention of the photo. to the point the content of the photo was immaterial? good shit.

yoda - i think whatever wording issues anyone before me ran into could, for the most part, be swiftly remedied with the littlest of grammatical tweaks. i can read through/past it, as it's not usually a problem for me, and suggests you didn't proofread or are a bit lazy like myself. either way, i don't care, it's inconsequential. though i cared enough to mention it. anyway, i won't lie, this is a difficult verse to digest. looking at it as a literary writing, it has significant aesthetic appeal. if six lines, either side, were divided by 'hypnotic shutter cycle' the latter half is vastly more lyrical - not in the hip hop sense. it's pretty. the two lines immediately after the split are ridiculous, though clouds of smoked butter threw me, a bit. this was a thinker's philosophical approach to photographs, whereas split invented a single scenario in which the photo was central. radically different approaches. the idea of the rifle framing the solider (presumably the scope) was outstanding. numbers lies/binary life defined was an excellent pair of lines, but the beholder bit before it was a bit awkward. i'm not sure if i'm being obtuse or you're being arcane, but i did have trouble swallowing some parts of the verse, which almost made the beauty that much brighter. it was a weird, almost erratic experience reading this. i presume you meant trace by tincture, and not a drug. that works for me.

my feed has been pretty shitty this evening, i'm sorry. but that's effectively my vote. both did well with the topic, but i suppose i enjoyed one marginally more, even if i laboured through parts.

v/yoda