[Diablo]

Okay, so I figured seeing as I read it and you've posted a few things here now with little feedback. I know of you from RR, so I'm familiar with your work to some degree. The scheming is very Lars-esque in that opening couplet but doesn't really come off natural sounding and that makes it read a little forced, IMO. If you're going to do it, make sure you do it cleanly, or you run the risk of the line seeming convuluted. It seems very simple, but it takes skill and experience to really master that stuff. Don't be deceived into thinking it's as easy to do as it looks, the degree of difficulty is obvious in how many people you see attempt it and not manage to carry it off at that level.

The second thing I made a mental note of was your use of stuff like "Patient, waiting, pacing, gracious". I fully understand WHY you would do it because of the multies and technical merit, but again, using them in this manner only makes it come off as unnatural and clunky. You would never speak like that in real life. Tell the reader a story. Keep it natural sounding. The multies used in that particular section are purely there to pick up points for technical merit and they don't really add anything to the piece overall, or help with the story development by pushing it forward, infact by doing what you had there (and at another spot a little later on) you were overdoing it and it actually detracts from the enjoyment of the read (as a reader) rather than add to it as you may have thought (as a writer). Again, it's a tough balancing act, you want to have the technical proficiency but you also want to keep the reader on side and not alienate them to what's actually happening as the story unfolds.

I like doing alliterative stuff in my verses so I did enjoy that perhaps more than I should. Sure, again, you could have reigned it back a little - less is always more in those cases IMHO - but I did like seeing you toy with it and add a little touch of something different. I also noted that around this section you seemed to take your boot off the neck of those strangulated multies. It helped, it read cleaner, though longer syllable end rhymes would have helped the flow to read smoother here. The story was allowed to breath, it opened it up, and I really enjoyed what you did with the dialogue here because you kept it short and snappy throughout which is what topicals need. You see far too many people write up entire rhyming passages of dialogue and it often comes off sounding awkward and unnatural, which you didn't do, so kudos on that.

Your flow seems to get more drawn out during the flash forward, the lines become longer, there are more syllables to them and it doesn't read as well when compared to the start. This is because you tried to develop the storyline more at this bridge, so again i completely see why you did that, but the best action for you around this point of the verse would have been to have kept the lines to a similar length to how it all began because that's what the reader had then become used to. The meter changed somewhat, from somewhat short and fast paced to a slower more wordy segment that was a little disruptive to the read. The sort of sentence breaks you used toward the end were an odd one. The first one worked for me, personally, mainly because it was short and snappy... the rest seemed out of place as they were basically non-rhyming (and sometimes rhyming) interjections that were probably illadvised in reality. Either make them all rhyme, or dont. The mix up of the two just leads to confusion and the last thing you want to do is confuse your reader while you're trying to anchor the verse LOL

Hope this constructive feedback helps you somewhat and it's taken with the good humour I intended it as. I'm always happy to help.

Keep that pen moving!