Playoffs! Round 1: 3. UnbornBuddha vs. 14. Soulstice \\ UnbornBuddha wins 4-3

[Certain]

http://i.imgur.com/xQXiuie.gif

Round 1


The Basics | Read the full rules here (http://netcees.org/showthread.php?t=96884).

Check-ins are required by Wednesday, March 18, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Verses are due Sunday, March 22, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Extensions of up to 24 hours are available upon request.

Votes are due Wednesday, March 25, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Each competitor must vote on three battles, with a penalty of one vote for every missed vote.

Verses may not exceed 48 lines or 650 words unless agreed upon by the opponent.

Topic


No Compassion


Good luck, UnbornBuddha and Soulstice.

[Soulstice]

She was a summery, calm breeze. Tussling palm trees
lovely and balmy, a sunset kissed horizon by birds aflutter and waltzing
upon butternut gardens. She was the solstice and sun in blissful alliance
what every rose seed hopes to become as trickles of lifeblood
kiss it as it rises - But I was frozen and numb. Cynical, freezing
Death march war-drum heart. Slow, deliberate beating
leading a viscous proceeding down my veins of ice
While I strained to write a lucid scribing for my stage of life
And my rage was violent as pages flying from loosened binding
In sable night, the moon had spied on a sickened chronicle
I met you in a descent to perdition. Unstoppable
And I felt what I thought was past the fringe of possible

Deep in the forest..
I kneel on the ground by Sarah's bludgeoned body
And give her thanks for what she brought me.

It was a wintery windstorm the way her splintering ribs warped
There lay summer-breeze Sarah and her incorruptible chakras
Resolute as her physical stiff form - we finished the marvelous sin
Made love on the title, blood washing our skin WITH your thunderclap smile
And my deluge of desire, to properly win you and be a suitable sire.

A grim smile cracks, looming over my dead wife
The corpse that allowed me to let out the inside
I apologize to Sarah, torrid and glib
That she had to be caught in metamorphosis' midst

Talk of our work traveled in hesitant, hushed tones
With massive embellishments and the trappings of hellishness
We were savage and lecherous: made love slow. Touch, groan.
Unloose lush moans laying on a littered mess of crushed bones.
These little deaths at the moons peak kept us coated in maroon streaks
Caught your dimples excited in my twinkling iris at the sound of doomed screams
during a vigorous knifing. Things grew hotter and deadlier
with Miss Naughty Predator of the erotic medley. Your skin
would tear in my grasp. Or maybe it was a body we left barely intact
Tangled in thrush-rotted flesh, then you'd airily laugh in your blood-sodden dress
My perfect companion in all her murderous grandeur.

I left Sarah's side and stalked down the creek
Feeling the ethereal past that haunted the trees

You. My Madwoman Maria, stalking in the night by my side
But your frenzied laughter grew thinner when skin and scythe would collide
I sensed an ending chapter to our psycho reprise. Your mental blackness
Seemed more light in the sky. At first it was silly mistakes
Stopped kissing your blade, and let little children escape
Even housepets saw continuing days. The memories manage persistence
But the damage eclipses as your viciousness wanes, like a stanzas ellipsis
Your past now only reads like philanthropist vignettes. A body of work
Displaying cancerous symptoms. So at the first tear in your eye
I said an unfeeling goodbye. And put shears in your spine.

I kneel to Maria, pay penance and smile
Pause a moment to remember the flesh we defiled
I hear nature take a breath. Soon comes the morning
I look down the creek at the bodies.
There are still dozens to worship

[UnbornBuddha]

No Compassion

Compassion the term:
Every man and ghost go through a transcendental journey
That is later deemed a product of their mental story.
The metaphor of our hearts is determined by stress and worry
Stimuli terraforming from the eventful currents of our sensual organs
Fully erect at the premise of existential glory, the central absorption.
Compassion is but a set of messages from our active potential cortex
Open to interpretation, which sociopaths use to defend their fortress
While alive in their terrestrial corpus they suppress their chemical urges
And later on as they level up in their metamorphosis
Becoming deities in charge of certain constellation portions
They then choose to release their neurosis and descend its torment.
Celestial order is disturbed as we’re attacked by ancestral forces
Compassion becomes an excuse to execute universal torture
Entire cosmos become a battlefield for extraterrestrial swordsmen
Dueling for honor and other intellectual workings
That to this day is disputed upon in graduate level courses.
But, is dueling for honor actually true at the expense of others?
No compassion doesn’t have to mean taking refuge under hatred’s comfort
In this age of modernity where the cybernetic governs,
It can just be synthetic life forms who are incapable of emotion
Would you accuse a machine of devilish devotion?
That’s quite a fatal of a notion since we’re dependant on voltage
Our biorhythms have been hardwired to a regular electricity dosage.


The common misanthropist says: We’re in a deep yin femininity coma
With our whole being frozen in an icy negativity ocean;
Every breath focused on deliberately probing social responsibility boneless
Until, moralistic divinity exposes it’s every sinful trait, the specificity omens
Unmasked turn out to be the coldness our soul statistically holding;
Humanity deserves to be sadistically frozen
Quickly!!! Before we’re once again parasitically cloning
Though, our whole race is paradoxically broken
Our sufferings run deep, we’re barely materialistically coping
Activists are in an acidic state with their tree hugging malicious ways
There is the reason all cancer rates have risen great
Soon enough, you’ll be making your clinic date.
Our spirit fake, which is why malignancy strikes our malignant brain
Why there? Rene Descartes believed our soul to be in our pineal glands
We must experience wicked pain because it’s God’s linear plan
So, we’ll realize that both he and we have a trivial path
Our biblical past brings this cynical man a cheerful laugh
Ha! This play we’re in has a delirious cast of characters with inferior acts.

Deathwish:
I’m pleading pantheons to propel meteorites along
Our way just to wipe the smile from your bacterial laden gums
Until, every composite of our graves is gone
Hence, a zero percentage of a zombie apocalypse
After all, that will mean we’re alive, albeit in a snobby metropolis
Necropolis, where all the undead try to cultivate a Gandhi-like consciousness
Besides, how will a swami or prophetess stop corporate dominance, lobbyist politics
That the populace swallows, without a single oscillation in their esophagus
There is no hope, not even mummification in a sarcophagus
This is a compilation of a somnolent desiring not the sacred but the bottomless
After all, what kind of a sadist wants happiness?
Perhaps, I will reconsider if there was more engagement with commonsense
But, ignorance is strong when blinded by the nameless killer, opulence.

Readers,
Compassion, in this case, necessitates more than generic feed
It will require a turning about of my entire pessimist creed
And I’m afraid that requires humanity to take a giant genetic leap.
You see compassion and its opposite can mean many predator things
Heck, it can just be the fact that the Nebula bleeds
Life onto us secular beings that require warm temperature suits
Please, enlighten me or yourself, otherwise the sedative deep
Because when the only etiquette our skeleton features
Is rhetoric speeches, we become delicate prejudice creatures
Akin to the nemesis in Resident Evil.

[Adonis]

Longer Version in mag


This is a very tough vote. You both executed certain aspect at a top notch level. Buddha brought his vast depth of thought and concept while Soul recounted a very decrepit and lucid imagery paired with some rather fine flow. Each were wordy as can be expected. I honestly don't think either should lose because I enjoyed both verses, however, one did play to my preference far greater than the other.

V/Soul

As long as far back as I can think I enjoyed the macabre style over anything else this earth can offer, kind of weird because this is the case in reading only, hate horror or gore movies because I'm a sucker for depth in that instance. In any case, soul matched cadence with dark imagery which I prefer nearly 100% of the time over the thought provoking verse. Dark imagery alone, not cadence.

[CopyPat]

Jesus... Buddha I gotta be honest, I had a REAL tough time just laboring through your verse. for one its just waaaaay too long, secondly it's dense as fuck, number 3 the vocab took me out of it sooo many times because I had no idea wtf you were saying, 4th i just found it super boring with no point to the story. that's probably my own lack of intelligence but It just read like a whole lot of rhyming words to me with no progression or sense of where the writing was going. I think you can be your own worst enemy sometimes by just going SOOO intense into the wording that you get away from what you're really trying to actually say. i would personally prefer to see you ease up a little, and make ur stuff more approachable. this was just way too much for me..

soulstice your verse had a lot of vocab as well but it read more poetic and less technical(than buddha). it added to the feeling of the verse rather than take away from it. your story took a common murder type theme but switched it up a little by making it about u and ur wife. it was a solid verse for sure. the way your worded everything was quite elegant and gave me lots of dead man feels lol.. u kept my interest with a more comprehend-able verse.

Vote: soul

[Split Eight]

I had UnbornBuddha. explanation incoming.

[Certain]

Soulstice: I think this is basically your weakest form. You come up with a very detailed and elaborate scene (or two) and go painstakingly granual, but you never let us see the forest from the trees. Your writing at times was really deft, and I put together the story at the end, though I didn't like the bait-and-switch. But the scene-setting didn't really interest me. It lacked movement, which became very noticable with the length.

UnbornBuddha: This verse was so long, and your writing can be so laborious. It's difficult to read your writing at times because of how unnatural the phrasing is. It's not at all like anyone would speak or even write in prose or poetry. It's like academia squeezed into a rhyme scheme that doesn't quite fit. But your content can be very good sometimes. I didn't think you justified the lengths, but I did think your verse was more interesting than Soulstice's. That leads to the value judgment: Should I be voting for the verse I preferred reading or the verse that gave me more when I was done? I'm leaning toward the latter. You rewarded the painstaking read. But I do wish you wrote in a more natural syntax.

Vote: UnbornBuddha

[Mike Wrecka]

gonna give a quick vote here.


soulstice - had a well written verse that I found terribly boring. the first few bars in the beginning felt clunky but it picked up after that. I usually try to make my first few bars the best in my verse. meaning I spend the most time on them. to pull the reader in. yours had the opposite effect on me. but I continued on. and the verse started to flow a lot better and eventually I became somewhat invested. but tbh nothing really happened in this verse. it was meant to be a verse describing someones thoughts. but it was completely emotionless. which seems intentional and matches the topic. but overall it made for a very boring and lifeless read.


Buddha - enjoyed this piece. I really like the phrasing you use. though it is rather obscure like


Entire cosmos become a battlefield for extraterrestrial swordsmen


I don't know what that means. aliens with swords battling it out in space. like star wars level type shit. lol. see that's what I enjoy about your writing. one of your lines contains a snippet of a large thought or idea that I expand into a epic saga in my mind as I read it. that's kinda dope.


that being said though, writing like that can kind of effect the continuity of any plot or story your trying to convey.



you also had some stuff that made me stop and think about how deep of a thought or concept you just delivered like


It can just be synthetic life forms who are incapable of emotion
Would you accuse a machine of devilish devotion?
That’s quite a fatal of a notion since we’re dependant on voltage
Our biorhythms have been hardwired to a regular electricity dosage.


that's a unique and really interesting point of view. never really seen that idea presented but its really deep. whats the difference between us and machines, since humans actually contain electricity that keeps their biorhythms running. wow good stuff



ok gtg



vote- unborn Buddha


really enjoyed his verse. soulstice got lost in the topic . pz

[oats]

Soulstice:
the rhyming was crisp, and the writing was rhythmic and fluid, so on pure aesthetics this was a fun read no doubt. But I had some pretty inconsolable clarity issues. I think your knack for detailed descriptions hurt you here, it just became overbearing and difficult to piece together. In a vacuum, each stanza made sense, but it could have really benefitted by some concrete action, or even narration, to ground me in the actual goings on of the story. Apologies, because I read this last night, and now again in the morning, and I still only have a vague idea of what is going on. Perhaps it simply requires more time to chew on mentally, but this didn't work for me.

Buddha:
there is a lot going on here. your subject matter is overly academic circa philosophy 101 class, and while I don't mind that angle per se, I felt this was much to expository to really have an impact. That being said, you did bring up a lot of intriguing issues and ideas, some of which were new to me, and I appreciated coming across them. The verse was long, though, to the point that, at the end, the final salvo of addressing the reader directly lost a lot of steam, whereas the technique could have worked much better with a more succinct piece imo. It just felt a bit redundant.

Vote: Unborn. Sorry for the brisk breakdown, but even though his writing wasn't nearly on the level of Soul's, I felt his execution was more successful, and the ideas were interesting enough to tip the scales in his favor.

[NYCSPITZ]

yo close battle. I liked the content in unborn's more but soulstice had better storytelling. Overall, I thought there was too much awkward wording in unborn's to make the content shine over soul's crispness and storytelling. Gonna have to give it to soul in a relatively close one tho both can do better.

v/ soul

[Certain]

OK, unless Dr Dog explains his vote enough to qualify, this is tied up at 3-3.

[Split Eight]

first, must obtain 40 ozs
Im already at the store so. Give me till 5:15

[Certain]

OK, out of fairness to Soulstice and UnbornBuddha, we will go first to five votes wins. It's 3-3, and when our good friend Dr Dog explains his vote, it will be 4-3 (likely to UnbornBuddha).

[Split Eight]

sounds good, just shredded some shoulder myscle and am trying to type without pain

[Certain]

sounds good, just shredded some shoulder myscle and am trying to type without pain

…

[Split Eight]

Soulstice.

thought the metaphor that you were using wasnt readily apparent. it came off as grotesque. the rhyme scheme wasnt your best work, it was slightly mismatched from line to line. A verse I didnt quite understand/ appreciate, perhaps, but after three read-throughs I'm understanding the connection to the topic but not enjoying it.



UnbornBuddha.

wasnt feeling the overall rhyme scheme or stylistic approach, it was clunky (clunkier than Soulstice for sure) due to its heavy syllable count and haphazard flow. The storytelling could use some work, in making your points clear to the reader without preaching down to the reader, and the format wasn't my favorite- but it was slightly more to chew on than what Soulstice provided this week.

Apologies to both for the mediocre vote.

V/Unborn