[PancakeBrah]

My AC is on the fritz. Ryan Adams' "Come Pick Me Up" is a good song.

CIMMERIAN-

Boy meets girl. They have a kid, the piece transitions to the perspective of the kid, kid meets girl, has his own kid, then dies. Ending recalls the beginning, with other in piece allusions ("there's ladders to climb"/"corporate ladder rungs"). All written tightly. Ellipses, dashes, commas, rhymes. All well and good. The wording wasn't spotless, but the wording strove to be spotless.

"Basement cigarettes, the girl with the bangs"

This is the best line in the piece. Because of the CIGARETZ. No, but it was nostalgia tinted and told a whole story with precise wording. The reader knows the significance.

"Brain still the same" and "...until he found the One" were the only bad wording choices. Too utilitarian for the piece, for how the rest of the language in the piece was used.

I don't think this is the greatest topic. It's screaming "WRITE ABOUT DEATH!", and writing about death is so trite for these sites. No one has anything interesting to say on the subject, as far as I've seen. So you filled in as many life touchstones as possible, to give heartfelt context to the fleeting nature of life, instead. Death wasn't mentioned or alluded to until the end with "simple goodbye", which was a great way to couch it. This wasn't overtly emotional, or solemn, or sentimental, but the reader could fill in the emotion through the simple timeline and effective use of language. It was generally broad (pronouns instead of names, shared life events) but in a way that lets the reader color within the lines, and every line had this momentum of dread (probably because we know the topic, but still). Not overt, Hollywood dread, but the kind we all have in our baser selves when we hear clock ticking. A tightly wound (in form) piece that accomplished its point well. Thanks for the read.

DEAD MAN -

Boy is on the normal, right, track, then becomes a dead man character; shoots drugs, prefers Mescal, and smokes. Comes to a moment of clarity, ostensibly through thoughts of his family (father in particular), and generally gets his life together. We assume it works out well for him, through the tone of the piece/ending. But there's no regaining the time lost, no matter how happy the ending can be. So many little flourishes in this piece, yet nothing was out of place. The only line I could quibble with would be

"culture-shock is the term
for leaving one reality for years, then returning"

That was a bit expository in relation to everything else in the piece. Just didn't have the momentum (new buzzword), or tone of basically every line. Because I will say that almost every other line in this was either perfectly worded, had a cool little trick/flourish, or hit you in the feels. Peak Dead Man level stuff. The Orale/Geronimo combo, the ellipses before "stoop", book-ending the protagonists' time out of mind between apocalypse now/faded, the reference to Kant (in the middle of a great rhyme phrase), etc. So much to look at. This was a bell curve story. Quick exposition at the beginning and end, a huge stomach in the middle. You like to write about difficult/troubled characters (everyone does) so its no surprise that portion of the narrative gets the full focus here. But it works narratively as well. You focused on the clock aspect of the picture, very little to do with death, generally. And how your choices vs. time define everything, can't be taken back. Not some earth shattering concept, but the point of this is the execution. Back pedaling a bit, after re-reading, I do think the section after "apocalypse faded", as a whole, is a bit looser and less refined. But not drastically so. Just a powder keg of a verse. Thanks for the read. Maybe your next verse is about a 35 year old white man in Minneapolis who's never even heard of Kant, works at corporate Best Buy, has a happy family, and fishes on the weekend.




Both writers attacked the topic with a similarish idea. Cimmerian attempted the "less is more" strategy (as always), trying to fold the piece of paper eight times, so that every possible extraneous idea someone could have on the topic is on top of another, forming just one necessary sentence. I think he basically succeeded. Dead man did his dead man thing, this time in a more clearly narrative type of verse. In the dead man canon this verse was in the top 30 percentile. Both verses were worthy of this so illustrious tournament, and for that both deserve commendation. I just enjoyed dead man's aforementioned creativity in exploring his story. A short verse can beat him, definitely, but I think Cimmerian's verse last week was a better example of the form. Just a pip below his opponent in this one, a battle I could see coming down to preference, instead of clear knockout consensus. Well worth the read!

Thanks fellas.

v/dm