[Certain]

Vividlyvague: This verse was interesting. It seemed sort of patchwork, almost like three different writers wrote sections of it and glued it together. I understood the Edgar Allan Poe feel you were trying to go for here, but I think you failed to properly set the mood. The rhyming was as weak as any I have seen from you. I hope you didn't rush to write this, as Frank requesting an extension was probably the most predictable development of the week.

1/1/14


Dear Journal,

Lust; the crust on the cusp of this affair.
Her bust... to touch was a must to declair.
Every portion's proportion, each morsel of flair
Supported the endorsement of this temptress so fair.
She aborted the coarseness of care,
For it was more for reward of the fare; this visit.
A dare to dismiss it, but this priss was presented permissive.
She invited me to her soul, and where I'd be remiss, I couldn't resist it.

There were a lot of poetic devices here. The "Dear Journal," entry point immediate disengaged me from the verse a little, though, as it's so trite to write to your diary or journal. That felt very unnecessary, as did the date. We don't write a whole lot of modernist stories here, and there was nothing about this that felt particuarly 2014 or New Year's until the very end. You want to start a verse with something important, not these entry points that really don't contribute to the story. As far as the writing, well, it seemed as though you were trying to channel Adonis. And there was some reward. The writing here sounded pretty, but it ultimately didn't go anywhere.

Every patient caress, thrusting cut, careful intermission...
She was mine.
All of her impassive visage. All of my wishes committed intentions.
However extensive, my infatuation was truth's incentive.
I needed to awaken tofacts of basic instinct and distinction of what this is.

I liked this part to the point where I wanted it to be the introduction. It's here that you make obvious without making obvious your twist that isn't surprising but it somewhat effective. The writing is good, but the rhyming is unusually weak for you.

She was under arrest; under duress, wrapped in marital coils.
A stress, this veritable mess, for the excess to have maxed her toil.
He ended it.
This millionaire with mistresses, bastards aplenty; an animal's spoils.
Commending him coyly, I recieved of his payment in all hopes she'd be as disloyal,
But only in a manner of speaking... in this lair eternal.

I think it was a stylistic misstep for you to try to hide the identities and life states of your characters. For one, I generally dislike that tack. But I also think you have a hard enough time telling a story without a twist, and this storytelling structure inherently is confusing. Here is a good example. Parts of it work without the twist but not when it's factored in. Parts of it only work with the twist. It's a segment intentionally losing the reader, though, and that's never a good idea.

She could be here with me! Her and all her blemishing oils,
Meek and blanching palette, features of mediterranean royals,
Bludgeoned sternum, rashed knees and elbows, and foot burns made boils.
He 'loved' her to death, but her inaminate allure brought me to life.
In each examining breath, I grew more adamant to know of the whys.

Here (despite the "inaminate" mistake) is where I picked up on the general (if not specific) purpose of the verse on my first read. This was a good stanza, though. It was grounded by clear images and solid word choice.

She was cleaned and divided; an inspection by police'd get no findings.
Slated for shredding machines when the light hit, but my attachment called for a cc to this night's end.
He was pleased when invited; showed with an extreme sense of excitement,
On the pretense of 'two men: heroes, cleansing slease from our environments.'
Him, her. Me, him.
Therefore, the need to be obscene worked in spite of him...

The rhymes aren't perfect here, but it was almost awkward that you shifted into focusing on them for this stanza. You'd basically abandoned the pretense of caring about rhyming for most of the verse, then return to it here. I think you did a good job of moving the story along with this stanza, and it was one of the better ones when the rhyming is factored in. I'm not sure what "my attachment called for a cc to this night's end" means. CC could either mean carbon copy or cubic centimeter, but I didn't quite connect either term to the purpose. I'm guessing you were describing the man is a carbon copy.

"So why'd she need to die? That's not a divorce's requirement..."
He cheesed, "She was the nicest bitch, but I have wilder flings on other continents!"
The nerve of this creten. Smiling as if these childish things were accomplishments...
The sirloin screamed to be eaten. Beseeching him yielded results beyond astonishing.

Is "beseech" the verb you're looking for? That last line really threw me off in general. It made it seem like your narrator was going to cannibalize him. Otherwise, you did a decent job giving motive for the murder.

Venom is the black mamba's marvel.

His graying corpse was stripped of its garment, boots,
Thrown in the chipper, left minced, canned for a pig's farm food,
And she watched it all too. Not as a mannequin, but my baby doll who
Had chosen me to watch Ryan Seacrest's ball fall in New
York. True love was dead, but chivalry was an art renewed...

Journal- This has been my confession to you,

...with a heavy heart,

'The Taxonomist' Bartholomew

What's up with the black mamba line? Are you suggesting this taxonomist used a black mamba to kill the husband? That's a terrible method of murder. Even Kill Bill makes that obvious. I didn't much care for the ending because it all seemed to center on a twist that had been made pretty obvious by that point. The Ryan Seacrest thing seemed forced, and again, this story never felt like it was taking place in 2014 or on Jan. 1 outside of the time stamp and this one line, so giving it a time reference like that seemed trivial, particularly given the placement. I also wasn't crazy about ending the story with a rhyme off a name that didn't seem to bear any relevance beyond it being the character's name. Had you flipped the rhyme to be off "taxonomist" and ended it with "Bartholomew, the taxonomist," that would have felt a little more natural.

As a whole, this verse was pretty standard fare, though the weak rhyming is difficult to excuse. It definitely did not rise to the levels of your best work. It was a decent take on the topic with some creativity shown, but some of that was undermined by the ambiguous nature of the first half of the verse. You had this good concept but buried it until the end and refused to let us see it until a second read. I think this story could have been told in a different format, perhaps leading with the life of a taxonomist stuffing departed animals for their owners and weird shit like that, followed by the unusual request of a wealthy man who wants his wife by his side, followed by the falling in love between the taxonimist and the dead woman, whom he then perceives to have been murdered by her husband, followed by the murder of the husband and finally, perhaps, by a twist that the husband didn't murder her at all. But that's just how I would have taken this concept, and frankly, I probably wouldn't have come up with this concept in the first place. This topic was difficult, and I think you did a good job with it for the most part, but I know you can do better.

Frank: You ran the counterattack, possibly because you read Vividlyvague's verse or maybe not. Either way, your verse was a good example of extremely straightforward narration and storytelling.

Hi - I’m Frank.
I am a Police Officer for a city known nationwide for its crime rate.
We have a lot of gangs and drugs in my state;
At one point we were #2 in homicides per capita -
I cleaned up the streets he says, wiping the slate.
I have a police K-9 named Thor. He’s a German Shepard - Belgian Malinois,
He was certified in drugs and general duty
He retired at 3 years old because he was shot, protecting Detective Rizzuti…
Thor wouldn't allow drugs in my house. He would smell it.
He would tell on you. Rudely.

I think the decision to make the narrator an ex-cop was a fundamental key to your verse. That allowed for the procedural and removed storytelling. I know some cops. They're straight and cold when they tell a story. They're more likely to get angry than sad about pretty much anything. The stuff about Thor fit that narrative mode, too, because in my work I occasionally have to read police reports, and giving those kinds of details about things that don't matter is straight out of the police handbook.

The reason I say this is so you understand that I knew about drugs -
I had taught in schools about drugs -
My wife asks all our kids at least once a week if they used any drugs
My wife Kathy is a Nurse. Dusty was the oldest at 14.

OK, let's talk about the name "Dusty." That was a bit over the top. I did like the way you rhymed off drugs three times. Again, it felt true to the narrator and emphasized a point. It's interesting how the way you've set up this story, we already know Dusty is going to die because of drug use. I favor the straightforward approach. Nothing was hidden here.

Dusty loved baseball and played for his school’s team; He batted fourth,
He didn't always play much since it was his first year but I didn't care
My wife would take his uniform, wash it, hang it to clothes pins and watch it drift in the air.

Batting cleanup as a freshman, but not playing consistently? This was the worst section of your verse. Playing baseball didn't fit with Dusty's personality (or what we got of it), and this didn't make sense. And I'm not sure what the washing of the uniform had to do with anything, aside from maybe your only slight misdirection as to the relation to the topic.

-He also loved playing games on his computer; obsessive, euphoric,
When World of Warcraft was coming out in a beta version he signed up like 200 times to be a beta tester for it.
If you were picked, you got a number and could go to the site and download it.
Well, Dusty signed up so many times he received 2 numbers and sold it.
“For 375.00 dollars” – he said - gloating with pride
You couldn’t wipe his smile off with Castile soap if you tried.

This, on the other hand, was probably my favorite part of the verse. You could almost hear the dad's grin as he retold this story with a handful of the specific details he remembered. It sounded like the type of thing where Dusty had explained this in these specific words dozens of times, so his father would know what words to use even if he didn't really know what a beta tester was. Plus, I liked the return to cleaners with the Castille soap line, which could have come across as tacky.

I liked building computers. Occasionally I started building a new one.

This was a strange turn for the cop dad. It would have made more sense for Dusty to be the one who builds computers and asks his dad to buy this stuff for him, only to have his little brother "use it all" or something like that.

I also was working on some of my older computers; sitting in ruins
They were full of dust. Finger tips; Air borne - Gripping pollution
So, on one of my trips to the computer store, I bought a 3 pack of DUST OFF -
Refrigerant coolant
Dust Off is a can of difluoroethane, to deter, they’ve added bitterant to it.
It’s used to removes particles from electronic equipment - swifter than any swifter could do it.
Propellant - disillusion
It gives you a high, for about 10 seconds. It makes you dizzy, you get stupid

Nothing subtle at all here. Again, it fit the narrator. There was some good rhyming in parts of this, probably the smoothest section of the verse.

A few weeks later when I went to use them, they were all used, and
I talked to my kids and my 2 sons both said they had used them
On their computers -
I yelled at them. And went back to the computer store -
Livid!
I’m fuming!

I'm not sure how well the "Livid! I'm fuming!" part works here. The fuming wordplay makes sense, and it makes sense that he would get mad in the moment. But a big part of this narration is that the cop is cutting his emotions out of the retelling, just as he would on a police report. So to include that felt a little out of touch, though perhaps with a little bit of a shifted word choice, you could have had both.

They didn’t have the 3 pack so I bought a single jumbo can, oblivious and aloof, and I went home and I hid it in the room.
That night I left for work at 10 PM; And I didn’t tell Dusty goodnight.
At 11 PM my wife went down and kissed Dusty goodnight
At 5:30 am the next morning Kathy went downstairs to wake up dusty - he’d been missing some school.
He was sitting upright in bed with his legs crossed and his head leaning over pale white, dribbling drool…
She called to him a few times to get up. He didn't move.

The timestamps here are a really, really, really, really nice touch. The accounting for whereabouts is such an important part of a police report. That really hit home. Sometimes it seems like your loose way with rhymes is easy and free, but you really take a lot of time building your characters and narration in ways most others don't.

“It can’t hurt you Dusty! It’s cool! It’s like whipp-its! It’s like glue!”

A boy who lives down the street said a month before it killed him too.
She went in and shook his arm. He fell over; She went ballistic
A condition called Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome
When you inhale it, it fills your lungs and keeps the good air, with oxygen, out.
Dead - with the straw from the Dust Off can coming out of his mouth

Rest in peace

I've always found "Sudden Sniffing Death Syndrome" to be one of the clunkiest turns of phrase in science, but that's the terminology and assuredly what our police narrator would use. You painted the final image with great economy here, making sure that we could see it and letting that alone affect us emotionally, if it was going to. The point of this story was never the emotions. The point was to explain what happened. That's how police operate. They don't care about motives. They let lawyers worry about that. They want to know what happened.

I really liked this story and the entire take on the topic. I don't think I ever would have connected huffing to this topic, but it makes a lot of sense, and the handful of subtle nods to the topic were appreciated, too. But the narrative pacing was the most impressive part. You simply told the story the way it happened, the way our ex-cop narrator would have told it. I think that's part of what won you this battle.

See, Frank set up his story from the get-go to be an ex-cop giving the procedural details about how his oldest son died. And he stuck with that. Vividlyvague went with the trite journal entry, which can be saved but isn't easy. But why would a journal entry be so evasive about the facts? Why would a journal entry have a twist at the end? That's part of the problem with the format. That's not the only reason Frank won. He shone brighter here in most ways. But it's the part that stands out to me.

Vote: Frank