MTG Salvation

Vote for Lucknorris

I liked it. It was earnest, very direct and elegant, in a way unburdened by irony or modernism. The rhythm and structure were impeccable, and along with the staidness of the language, compounded to a work that reminds me a great deal of Frost. Excellent work

*****. I totally forgot to post something. My bad dude, I even had a few things ready.

---------------
We stand atop the mountain-
Bemoaning the thinness of the air
And the brightness of the Sun
Unaware of this great height
And the privilege of the sight

Unaware that we will never
Be able to make wrongs right
Never write our greatest works
And never see God unfurl
A mile long spool of truth

And drag it through the dirt-
A calloused fist raised at us-
Us; Who sprinted hard and ran
The gauntlet with jilted gaits
So that no one won the race

A finish line well never find-
Though the end is in our gaze.
Before us stands a specter:
A reflection and a ghost
Of the sins of past days

With a scratchy, haggard voice-
It sings a coded wall of noise:
A litany of mistakes and missteps
And a wellspring of regrets
That of us, implores:

"Feel you not, the heaving
Of your tired lungs?
The fading away of that
To which you clung?
Breathe- the end has come"

A few million years.
Not enough.
And never might have been.
Welcome to the twilight years-
The culmination Of unfelt fears

The Sprint is over, our world
Will Lilt and down the drain
We can only swirl-
It's already too late.
So look, Ye mighty-

Upon your work-
On your songs and
Your paintings
And your poems
And your porn-

And despair.
The dust will swirl
And the dirt will rise
And a foot, alone, will
Stand above the desert-

A plaque of golden bones,
Beholden to no man's gaze-
A reminder, from dead men
To dead friends-
"This is the only product of our days."

Some dope hip hop releases on the way people! Kendrick says he's finishing up his album, Kanye said in an interview that he's looking at september, october or november to release his new album,

But! NEW SHABAZZ PALACES

Thank god. I've only listened to two singles so far, but both are incredible. This year might shape up well after all.

Vote for Ilvaldi

Felt like a lot of the pieces were a little clumsy and aimless this week (mine included), and ilvaldi just happens to have a really strong grasp on reeling in wandering thoughts. Echoe's was about...something? Actually, literally as I'm writing this I'm realizing that it was probably about blasting for oil, which clarifies quite a bit. Before now I was only sure that it was set in the desert, and they all wanted to be in San Francisco. Blippy successfully recreated Radiohead's most popular song. And I'm not sure what to make of "Netherlands wins on penalties" except to say that mexico would have lost sooner or later against a superior netherlands team, and that the title probably confounds the subject.

The Last Temptation of the Millenial

If nothing is forever then why doesn't guilt have a ceiling or a floor?
If nothing is forever then why won't forgiveness ever open the door?
We've all got a cross to bear- a torch to bear- lions and tigers and bears and a thousand yard stare
And sometimes god damnit life's just not fair
And sometimes at night you sneak outside and think about crying by the moonlight
But you can't because Buchowski never cried but you can't be Buchowski because you never smoke and you never wrote a thing worth the ink
And all the bling in the world won't give you a name
That doesn't roll around the inside of your mouth
Like a caged rat in its miniature madhouse
Like a bloated blue tinged floater bashing against the rocks
With the letters arranged all wrong for you to ever be worthy of a song
If nothing is forever then when can i stop writing?
Will there ever be a more perfect tomorrow sighting or am I just another chain link
In my own enclosures siding?
Am I an artist or an addict if I just can't stop?
I can't hop trains I can't jump ship
And By self harm do you mean every time I open my miserable lips
Because the ***** that slips through those two,
Man it's like a long corporate letter typed in comic sans
Or a too-long poem written by my shaky hands
It's the banality of being bland
Even my regret is second hand
I am not an artist because art is forever
I am not an artist because I am just a guy whose read too much and not lived enough
I am just a snuff film in real time broadcasting live to your captive eyes
If nothing is forever then what happens when I die?
If nothing is forever then how could nothing be forever
If nothing is forever then when will I reach the end of my lies the end of the line the sublime finish sign that signifies some sort of symbolic retort against my short lived life?
I am less than an artist at best I am lip service to the god of mediocrity on his laminate throne;
I am the bone unpicked I am 3.4 billion slightly below average dicks I am wasted mouse clicks in an ocean of information
I am a reminder that nothing and no one will ever be perfect
I am a reminder that this hollow, stale bull***** is all worth it

Voting for Ilvaldi

I liked Echoe's haiku, but I guess like all Haikus it felt missing something. Maybe that's the point. It just didn't have much weight, to me; it hit my mind like a feather and floated around but never burrowed into anything. Felt similarly about Talore's: it was a fine piece of allegory, but I don't know that it made me feel any differently about the wind, or the sun, or your perspective. Maybe it's just me being a bitter Southwest native.

I liked Ilvaldi's. I didn't love it, but I certainly liked it, and it was certainly the one I was able to read deepest into. The most obvious reason is the delightful butter/jelly wax/wane metaphor being one of the most creative I've ever heard. More personally, the lines about the mouth "educating its existence," to me, is a reminder of metaphysics, and the fact that all things exist only in relation to other things.

And as proud as I'd like to be of my formatting- I didn't even think of it that way at all. I wrote it down in a fairly straightforward format, but whenever I email my poems to myself (to get them from my phone to my computer) it clears all the formatting and replaces them with a wall of doublespaced text. I only kept it because I liked the conversational rhythm it lent the poem, which I found fitting given how much my poetry of late owes to Frost.

It happens. I barely wrote ***** all year. I think every creative type on earth would love the secret to endless inspiration, but I doubt it's possible to achieve a state where you can come up with something good regularly.

Gently Underfoot

The rain came with the same

Sudden, bitter chill of the first

"No" heard.

A gulletful of denials

Spilled drunkenly

And in waves-

A thing of such

Healing and such

Hurtful splendor-

That the sun covered

Her face until cracked

Soil smiled in surrender-



A small thing,

Resigned to regal

Roilings in the sky.

(Whoops: accidentally posted my entry for 255)

vote for Ilvaldi

I liked it. I liked Intensely Personal, it just felt a little clumsy. But maybe that was the point. Wireless I think suffered from a bit of a classic misstep of clunky rhymes; my advice is to focus on the meter (syllable counts; stressed/unstressed patterns) rather than the rhyme initially, since that's what makes it actually sound good. Everything else was good but not remarkable.

Quote from Ilvaldi »

Rather than something dramatic like last time, how about a scene that's slice-of-life? I.E. the LEAST dramatic scene. I.E. the MOST everyday scene you could think of. That said, make it interesting--something worth reading. Maximum length would be approximately 1200 words (that's 3 pages in Times New Roman font).

I'd write for that

Hues Unheld

We are the last wave gone by.
We are the dying of the light.
We are the gold; hard held by
nature's failing hands-
A hard edge on soft skin-
An ill wind blown in gentle ears.

We'll try and count the books
while the library burns;
A function of frailty
leaves no stone unturned

Quote from technogeek5000 »

Just saw Sage Francis in concert last friday promoting his new alum that dropped on the third, Copper Gone. Was a crazy show and the album is probably his best yet. Here is a stream:

http://www.spin.com/articles/sage-francis-copper-gone-stream/?utm_source=spintwitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spintwitter

I think I might hate the album. I'm serious. Even as a huge fan of Sage and his whole sect of battle rap indie diehards, the schtick is tired. He's officially milked it dry. At best; it sounded like a tired retread of his last couple albums and EPs, and at worst it sounded like Sage had no ******* clue what he wanted to do. The first track, to me, was the most telling. The schizoid tangle of random sounds works for guys like Mac Miller who, musically, make very bizarre music in the name of experimentation- Sage doesn't have that. He's very proudly anti- experimentation in hip hop. It feels bizarre that he's still fighting against the "current" state of hip hop, when hip hop is perhaps at it's most experimental stage ever- Mac Miller and Chance the Rapper and Young Thug are huge and Childish Gambino is accepted at the top of the rap mountain. I don't know what right Sage has to be mad about anymore. I would've much rather heard him doing weird type ***** with the weird type people in the indie rap sphere than hear him do his normal "Rap Game Buddy Wakefield"

Oh, we were just supposed to post our votes? I was waiting on like a separate voting thread or something, PRC style. I'll Vote for Ilvaldi, because I thought it had the ghost of greatness in it. Not an excellent standalone piece, but I can appreciate both that it was written in relation to a larger work and that it's a good end to a broader piece. The last line was good, for sure.

Quote from tucsok007 »

lol

I agree, 2014 hip hop has been a joke.

No, but in all seriousness, almost nothing has come out this year. There were some Kanye snippets...that immediately disappeared off the internet. The Roots have a new album out, it's not bad I guess. Mac Miller put out his "faces," mixtape, which I have mixed feelings about, but overall it's a pretty solid listen. Oh and then there's LIL B THE BASEDGOD'S HOOP LIFE MIXTAPE for the based fam. Anybody got anything else on their radar?