[Split]

Dead Man.
Interesting you brought Black back for your verse this week. Symbolic or careless?

I enjoy reading into your verses. Perhaps you played with Legos as a child, and the process astounded you. Psychology's kind of like building blocks, right? You don't create a story backwards, you create an idea backwards.

Anyways, on topic. I enjoy reading into your verses because your wordplay, devices, descriptions all fit within these little blocks, that you then flow together into your story. And while it is hard to look back on say, a memory or movie and examine its significance, it is quite easy to look back and create any number of definitions for a moment or scene. When used in these discrete chunks, there is one connotation that makes them flow on a metaphysical/ meaningful level, like a path of least resistance, and I caught this once before- in your playoffs verse against Essen- it was like a spark of gunpowder lighting across colored sands through the verse. Here, I feel like I caught it again- hard.

So it made this cool descriptive effect, where since everything aligned in terms of story, the descriptions were mad aligned too.

For (what I perceive as your method, maybe that's not u at all lol) your method of storytelling it either clicks well, or washes and fizzles out. Here, it was crisp and beautiful.

anyways, the guru slash teacher/ student metaphor was and excellent match for the picture... I felt like there was a strong tie to your life in the leaving having not truly taught conclusion... I don't know you, so I can't say. But I feel the one-way directionality of the picture was nicely reproduced in the way you expressed regret at bringing light and not enlightenment, awareness and not consciousness, and a path but not a journey.

FrankFurter.

Ok. Cool verse. Repetition was used well but also overused, in my opinion. It was cool how you tracked the two and their different journeys given the same circumstances... Awesome play off the picture. I feel like you really throttled yourself in the line limit though, the characters motivations weren't clear and it seemed very crucial to interpreting the story. The mirror symbolism was strong but also like polishing a corvette whose timing belt has slipped a notch. I definitely feel like your story would have had a KICK. If you had relied more on the reader for piecing it together. I definitely know what it's like when you put too much faith in the reader and no one knows what you are talking about, but here everything was muddled for me. Still a good verse especially when put into context of the topic, that covers up nearly all of these storytelling criticisms


So, where dead man has a strongly focused narrative that uses eclectic and hazy eyed storytelling, our friend Frank has a wide spanning landscape that uses highly concentrated and intricate detail. Dead Man had a hit of heroin and Frank had an LSD come up. When read and referred to the pictures, Frank's works as something that you are constantly reflecting on, while dead man's is like a before/ read verse/ after view the picture again. I really, really enjoyed the way Black expounded on the perspective on the picture, his verse really came alive


V/ black

Dope battle