Sym- I felt you opened this up strongly, getting straight into the action from the jump. We had a character, we had a familiar setting, the lines were kept short and punctuated that made for a good flow, I also enjoyed the hanging rhyme switch-up in your fourth line before you returned back to the initial rhyme in your first couplet, you mixed it up well here. There was a flair to it. You laid your stall out well from the get-go and you know what, I’m right there with you here, the imagery of the discarded bagel and cold juice on the counter may only be snippets of a faster moving collage but they’re all helping to bring this together. I enjoyed the playing with words between locked out/locked up - it was done subtly but is noticeable. ‘Bobbleheads that wobble when’ was a nice internal rhyme also that I’m not overlooking here, giving you some added technical merit while also coming off perfectly natural and adding an implied rhythmic cadence I also enjoyed. This is Symetrik at the most polished we’ve seen him.
Quote:
While her residence is homely - her car is more surrealist.
Her home is for her “friends”, for whom her trauma, she conceals it.
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The first line here reads well, the description of the car being ‘surrealist’ worked for me and added some intrigue about it, due to the word choice used, though I wasn’t such a fan of the second line here in this couplet, if I’m honest, and that’s largely due to the end choice of words which felt a little unnatural to me. I don’t actually find it’s the rhyme, as such, that makes me feel like that so much as the pause before it’s delivered. I think the concept was fine, but the execution maybe wasn’t at the level seen in the lines proceeding this one. It’s not bad though, by any means, it’s more that you set the bar so high for yourself at the beginning.
The final third was where the story needed a huge payoff for the buildup here, I felt you had laid solid foundations early on and I don’t know if the line limit means you were then running short of lines to really drive it home or what but that’s then how I was left feeling in regard to the conclusion. The outside link was one I did actually click on as I was intrigued and I think it worked within the framework you set out, you had a clear defined narrative here you wanted to expand on and you used that to world-build within its parameters. I think you were largely successful in that regard. The quality of the writing didn’t falter, even towards the end, it felt more so that either time was against you or, as I alluded to earlier, perhaps what was more likely here is the line limit was too restrictive for a piece like this which was bigger in scope. It felt like it may have been more suited to an Open Mic drop you could flesh out even more and expand upon to really drive that final third home. Overall, good work, strong showing. Not what I would have expected to draw from the topic. Thumbs up on the creativity to really go outside the box with this one.