WK4 : Mike Wrecka(0-0) vs. Zygote(0-0) -- zygote 4-3

[Certain]

zygote: I loved the conceptual approach you went for here, as though tourists have elevated Paris into some sort of heavenly city when it's really just another dumpy metropolis. The storytelling was your standard fare, easy to follow but a bit too wordy at times, swiveling from great rhyme schemes to more simplistic stuff. But what surprised me was that you really dragged in the middle section. Your humor sensors must not be fully cranked up because the social parodies didn't really find a groove for most of the final two-thirds of the verse, up until the girl spoke English after all. That was unfortunate because you started and ended so well and because the verse was so long that the part I'm talking about (from the hotel until the middle of the final stanza, roughly) was no short span. Had you carried that section with rhyming, it might have read better and held my interest more, but you pulled back after a hot start on the rhyme mechanics. This had the feeling of a writer trying to shake out his competitive juices more than anything.

Mike Wrecka: I had such a hard time with this verse because the ending and beginning barely seemed to match up. I read it like 10 times. It seemed like you were going for something really creative, then just gave up and wrote the easy suicide ending instead. I searched for all sorts of references to "Jerome" that might have been part of some grander twist, but I found nothing. So maybe I missed something. The lyricism was sharp, better than usual even. I've liked the rhyme-heavy format you've been using lately. It's very easy to read. But the content stopped going anywhere about two-thirds of the way through, right about the time that used "emotional pain" and started cutting yourself with the dull blade of emo tropes. You had this battle won with a better ending, but it fell flat.

Vote: zygote