Digital gaps, no bridges.

[Illume]

___
Man, capitalizing habits for habits sake.
Our rhetorical hatred is placed to captivate.
The value today is in hurt, it'll have you deferred,
From compassion to nerves, and from happy to worse.
Language and Words. All this anger in verse.
We're tapping the worst of this well that is Earth.
We're a paradox and half of us are only half awake.
Castaways, Ocean's bottles trapped in a vacuum state.
When we pass away we'll be asked what did we have to say.
What we had to say is asking what point is there if we pass away?
We're here today, then taken. Can we look past the grave?
But we'd have no grave if we wasn't cast here for happenin's sake.
So what has to happen? How do we get past this fate?
What the fuck do we ask in this rap I make?
Does this virtual life mean there's nobody listening?
Is the universe oblivious to human existence?
Well now we don't even speak, what with digital systems.
There's no hugging or kissin. It's just typing and image.
The systems built to help us are the height of a hindrance.
All tokens and gimmicks, social erosion and cynics,
And we're openly willing to be slaves enlistin' ourselves
To this existence in a place where nobody's existent. Problems?
Problems: consolation, where nobody meets,
Coldest streets, empty lives, and no relief.
Empty words, imagery, fissure's deep, Believe me,
pixels don't portray how much of this picture's bleak.
Come with me for a suicide: Four hundred and forty people see a cry for help,
Three lines of text replies. Might get a "like" as well.
Then tonight we'll dwell alone in an olden hell,
Eroding self, loneliness. Salt poured in these open welts.
In a testament to the idleness of a lifeless age,
In a fight with fate, this night we'll cry, we'll cave.
The disconnect kills the kind we crave.
In a lifeless place we'll die. Bye. Escape.
Then benevolent masses will invade the pages.
Technology will speak and envelop the spaces.
There'll be efforts, tenderness, sentimental states.
But fuck it. Life's come by this night, a night too late.

[Mr. J]

I stopped reading after the second 'passed away'
I may come back to this at a later time but out of respect I am here..
and not to be a total dick I feel like your wording is crisp
the build up of the first few lines after the intro is smooth
but that little slip up just made me feel dirty...keep writing

[Split Eight]

Yo what's up, decent writing, just thought I'd give you a little critical breakdown. Thought one thing you did repeatedly really hurt this verse overall

Originally Posted by Illume

___
From compassion to nerves, and from happy to worse.
Language and Words. All this anger in verse.

Wasn't a fan of the asymmetry in this section, i thought that each item you listed was sufficiently different from the others that I didn't glean why they were combined like this. Like "compassion to nerves" deserves more attention, 'nerves' has a lot of different possible meanings & usually isn't associated with compassion. 'Happy to worse' is an oversimplification in comparison. The second line seemed to be filler. I think that this intro was easily outshined by other parts of your verse, and I think the piece would be more appealing with a stronger opening

To this existence in a place where nobody's existent.

I think this could be chopped out... it's true, and sounds neat, but it's not really novel and it doesn't need to be explicitly stated

Problems: consolation, where nobody meets,
Coldest streets, empty lives, and no relief.
Empty words, imagery, fissure's deep, Believe me,
pixels don't portray how much of this picture's bleak.

Again, didnt like how you used the list technique. It seemed a bit of a copout, like creating meaning by association. There's not enough glue to hold it together. The structure of the first line was bad- 'consolation' is out of place, 'where nobody meets' and 'no relief' seem to be appended to a thought that was never started.

I think a lot of your stylistic stumbles could be avoided by checking for parallelism.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paral..._%28grammar%29
When you group things together in an incongruous way, it muddles your writing. Here, 'coldest streets' and 'empty lives' go well together. It's because they're similar in purpose and meaning (follow the same chain of thought) and are grammatically similar.

Three lines of text replies. Might get a "like" as well.
Then tonight we'll dwell alone in an olden hell,
Eroding self, loneliness. Salt poured in these open welts.
In a testament to the idleness of a lifeless age,
In a fight with fate, this night we'll cry, we'll cave.
The disconnect kills the kind we crave.
In a lifeless place we'll die. Bye. Escape.

The first line is pretty trite. Second line was cool, third line I really enjoyed & you hit a rhythm. The bold was great. The bit after the bold was too abstract/ austere for my tastes.

There'll be efforts, tenderness, sentimental states.
But fuck it. Life's come by this night, a night too late.

First line, parallelism. Also seemed empty, like it was just sloppily appealing to human nature. Ending, kind of cool stylistically but I feel you were too all over the place


So I think in general- you overused one technique (listing things, chaining themes and scenes together indirectly) and it was ineffective. This hurt the clarity of everything, but I mean the writing was not de facto bad. And I've seen some of your verses and they were good.

The song "Scapegoat" by Atmosphere uses a very similar listing technique to a great effect



"Connected" by Pent Up has a similar message, too, perhaps you could compare and see what he did in a very similar context & compare it to yours. Almost like a faux topical match

Keep writing