[dead man]

i almost don't want to do this cause this is so much content and its late, but fuck it

UNIVERSE

i read this all the way through once. and i've come away with this. you've got an extremely imaginative mind as far as your story writing is concerned. never a time you have written anything conceptually simple. or anything aphoristic. its always a new adventure. you've got adventures in your head. its fantastic really.

that being said, your rhyme-form dialogue is really poorly done here. i don't believe any of your characters in their status or form. you don't really occupy a woman or a child. it barely serves to occupy the father. it almost reads like an alien version of what they imagine a human's inner dialogue sounds like.

examples are like

"you couldn't locate a frown on this face"

c'mon. that's terrible. you know that.

"something i hated to surmise"

"He of course fumed, "Hey!"

these were all pretty bad. there were others. i reckon one of the toughest challenges as a writer of fiction is authentic inner dialogue. this basically cemented that theory. which is ok. but someone has to tell you, this is poor form. even if you have to make it rhyme.

i wouldn't go through the trouble of pointing this out if i didn't think you were a tremendous talent and worth spending the time to expand on this.

anyway. the story was very cool. loved how you flipped the topic here. i went from confused to surprised and entertained. what else can you ask for. solid [B].



ADVERSE -

this is pretty heavy dude. i'll be honest, i read it twice. closely. and the 2nd time i liked it a LOT more knowing what you had going for you. seems that was your intention and it was effective in that matter.

my issue here mostly lies in the fact that you spent 60ish lines basically lamenting the same thing over and over. as a person beginning to have fatherly instincts, but without child, i feel this topic hard. i'm sure that's difficult. how many morning after pills have i handed out that could have been someone? but anyhow - this felt like a genuine work. whether it was or not, thats hugely positive. you stretch lines with unnecessary verbiage to the point i really want to stop reading and skip over a lot of content. especially in a verse like this where the entire thing is dedicated to a single focal idea that you more or less restate in different language for the entire length of the work. i guess my critique here is that you should have submitted something drastically shorter to contend with universe's long-form storyline. you did not have the content available here to justify how fucking long you made this.

just because your line limit is long, does not require you to stretch your work out to accommodate. Universe's style suits this form - yours does not. i think you made a strategic error here agreeing to that stipulation. this was heartfelt and sad, and beautiful in some spots. but largely felt bloated and poorly defined. [C+]

voting UNIVERSE.