[Certain]

I'm going to open my vote by saying I think this is the best battle of the season, and I say that having read every single battle this season.

Johnathan Mercy: Why did you start with "It" instead of "She"? The opening line might have been my least-favorite of the verse. I had to look up alacrity, and I feel very comfortable with my personal lexicon. This is a weird way to start talking about an awesome verse, but I do put a lot of stock in opening lines. The first stanza as a whole was seemingly more contingent on the rhyme scheme than anything. The second stanza was truly great, though. I really liked the Kennedy line, which had the potential to be a miss. And the final stanza wrapped things up well and perhaps added a bit to that opening stanza, which is a good sign of writing a complete verse rather than distinct stanzas. You have such tightly wound wording but maintain clarity despite the deep vocabulary and endless rhymes. It's really rather great. You (under your previous name) came after me, and I think I had always underrated you, putting you a notch below SacriFICE and a couple others from the era after my dominant run. What you've shown here is an unassailable style and complete mastery of it, and you definitely have risen on my list as a result.

Soulstice: The verse limit is 650 words or 48 lines, so you didn't need to request an extension. Anyway, this verse was tremendous. Your storytelling style had me from the beginning, in part because it's a bit like my own (when I invest myself in a verse), with very natural dialogue and a lot of visual scene-setting more than simply imagery for imagery's sake. There were bits of phrasing that simply were outstanding, particularly "red and blue and angry" and "In youth, infinite wisdom is replaced by desperate pride" and the closing line. I loved the last stanza and your decision to make the crate of stolen goods into something similar to the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Your characterizations were very strong, and I had a good grip on each. But I still thought the second stanza, involving the henchman who doesn't appear at all in any of the other stanzas, was a bit of a problem. For one, the last line of that stanza was crappy. But also, it just felt so separate from the rest of the story, and I would have loved to replace that stanza with an outlay of the plot and how the heist went down instead of jumping right to the shootout. We spent a lot of time on that shootout, and while it was well-done, a move can't be two scenes long. In order to best a topical verse as strong as Johnathan Mercy's, you were going to have to tell a really rich tale. Instead, you had really rich storytelling with a bit of a thin plot. So this vote gets cast against you but comes from an admiring place. You are tremendously talented.

Vote: Johnathan Mercy