[Illume]

Originally Posted by Veritas the invincible

The obligatory dream sequence’s ocean tide waxed and waned,

The participatory team’s weekends arose to hide the taxed and strained.

There seems to be an undercurrent of some kind of message about people getting away from it all, trying to escape reality, mundanity, or melancholy in this. An attempt at easing out of the humdrum, noise, and daily grind, but it's quite specific, which in itself makes it seem abstract. We have two single trees photographed in the forest, with these two lines.

The foolishness and uselessness of thinking chemicals relax the brain,

The clues which sit aloof and remiss, breathing air to coals, attract the flame.

The dues you ditch to snooze and bitch leaves it fair for foes to act the same.

The bruise, the itch, and the booze that glitch brings a stare that knows the path of shame

These four could have been a strong stanza for an opener, and although I can understand you're using irony here -- "there is no escaping the world, because even when you're away from it, it affects you; the shame of shirking responsibility, the pettiness of the reminisce about others, about the system, life, really -- I'd have understood the ironic inflection even if you hadn't set it up with the first two lines of the piece.

In truth you miss the proof which sits and sings its share of shows of wrath and pain

These jewels emit the routes in writ of wings that dare the prose the master’s claim

But the fools all miss for the amounts of shit that clings to the woes of their massive lame.

I think some of these words felt like filler. In the first line out of the three there are too many syllables and it feels clunky, although I understand the message, and the theme remains the same.

The second line is a little abstract, again. What are the "jewels"? Are they the proofs? The proofs showing the routes, that are written by the flight away from reality itself? The last few words don't make grammatical sense, "that dare the prose the master's claim". It might make more sense to say "That dare to prose the master's claim".

The third line is good until the last word. "Lame" isn't a noun, and it sounds kinda lame as a punchline, particularly when you've written it as a noun. It seems like a word you rhymed for the sake of rhyming it. I would have said "Clings to the woes of the massive game", or something.



Conclusion

Overall, I think that you show potential. You seem to have a raw sense for creating a rhyme scheme, but your work needs some more structural attention -- particularly your concepts and how you grammaticize them -- and it seems like you could spend more time finding alternate rhyme schemes which pack more power, instead of relying on the same one the whole way through and running out of rhyming words, then resorting to using words that don't really sparkle as well as others.

That I can tell you were struggling to find rhymes towards the end dulls down the punch of your last line, which really, should be just as good, if not better, than your first.

Course I'm no expert at writing, myself, but it's a lot easier to dispassionately critique someone else's work than to critique your own.