*Challenger name: caffine (Whoppers) [
O]
*Defender name: The Love Mutt (Clarice) [
O]
*Bet: 1K
*Type of Duel: Regular
*Judge: Adimurti
*Form: Free-Verse
*Subject: Fire
*Bets Paid: The Love Mutt; caffine
caffine
To sear through someone’s heart
In more ways than one
Restarting though faith has been one not lost
The settling of dust, the emerging frost
A mere few hours before
A change in mother-nature’s lore
Like an umbilical cord life and death severed
To hurl, spit and charge affront
Men, women and children, all take the brunt
They know this growing fire will be no runt
Weaving, curling, like colored gypsy hair
The devil has really left his lair
Blackened trees,
blackened hearts
Skeletal houses, sunken eyes,
We try to nurture mother-nature in all her ways
But all we see is contempt in her unfeeling gaze
With humanity on our side we’ll cope
Even with the toll and massive scope
The umbilical cord strung together again with tape
And rope
This is a lot stronger than the last piece I judged for you - the ideas, descriptions and presentation of both those are a lot better. I've italicised lines/phrases/ideas/parts I think you could work on to improve, either on a cliché or generic basis. There's parts where I feel you've cut off from the idea or description too soon and left it hanging. For example, "weaving, curling, like colored gypsy hair" and then you change your idea completely to go with a new idea which isn't as interesting. Rather than going through lots of ideas, try carrying one out and creating something with it - don't milk it until you're completely out of ideas to present or describe that one idea, but make it 'important' (for want of a better word) by building the context and messages into the images and ideas. Like your other piece (although not so much) there's parts of this that feel list-like, which is part of the previous criticism. For example: "skeletal houses, sunken eyes," starts to generate an image, but it could easily be a description of the windows in the houses imploding with heat, or dead bodies left in the fire's trail. "Skeletal houses spectate with sunken eyes," just pushes the image you want to show forward to the reader a little more, but still shows the same thing (if I'm right in thinking the above is what you were going for). Don't be afraid to use
enjambment, with your lines, grammar and ideas. It will provide a relief in the restrictions you seem to be putting on yourself at the moment. The continuing idea of
Mother Nature might benefit from you not stating that it's her that you're talking about all the time - like by showing that it's her towards the beginning and then keeping the references to her but without outright saying 'Mother Nature'. Also, the umbilical cord idea has been done quite a few times before, so be careful with it if you make edits because you could easily end up using some clichés.
But, as I said, this is stronger that the last piece [that I saw], so keep going into that direction. This piece seems to have a lot more thought going into the writing, too.
The Love Mutt
Only YOU can prevent adolescent Burn-outs
Her body moves like a wildfire,
crashing sporadically, mesmerizing
hair flickering out in sparks
I don't think the line break is enough to leave punctuation here. Maybe a dash?
her cinders still burning you
eons later.
Later, Smokey's warnings still haunt
you, rubbing her back, the sounds of her
Maybe make this second comma a colon or semi-colon?
retching and reek of the john
all that remains of her nightly
forest fire,
poorly extinguished
I think this would suit being in brackets more.
and today's chance of fire:
Instead of using 'fire' I think you should go with something showing a re-occurrence, seeing as fire's been used as a metaphor throughout.
high.
I liked this. The links with fire and it's [possible] aftermath on people being brought in and the way the fire's personified so strongly really worked, to me. The only real problem I had was the punultimate line, mainly because it kind of hinders the continuancy of the piece; and the punctuation suggestions are just to help more with reading and the flow, but no big issue. Apart from that, it's a good read.
3nodding
I declare
The Love Mutt the winner of this duel, for her stronger use of poetic devices and her use of the subject.
100
175
100
