A Night to End All Nights

[IOWNU200]

Alright it's been awhile since i've cracked my hand to writing an actual complete piece, so be as harsh as you can with this.

A Night to End All Nights

"Stand strong my love, you've set right in my soul"
A comforting counsel, but it wasn't enough to clear my conscience,
or to keep my knees from knocking.
Silence surrounding always seems to steal my voice
This bitter cold night is my impending doom,
but It's beautiful in any state of mind.
My brain has been bracing for days,
but I don't have the perspective
to say anything.

My cage is caving in, but I can't scream at all
I've already accepted that the ends justify the means
It took the panic skreiks around me to teach me i'd done wrong,
Still passion is dust in the wind when you play with wits all day.

And my head hits the ground as the experiment that went wrong.
Former leader, current scapegoat, clears the conscience of them all.
Embodied with true spirit my heart never accepts failure,
And I despise all the fools that think this will bring them closure.

[-:Vincent:-]

"Stand strong my love, you've set right in my soul"
A comforting counsel, but it wasn't enough to clear my conscience,
or to keep my knees from knocking.
Silence surrounding always seems to steal my voice
This bitter cold night is my impending doom,
but It's beautiful in any state of mind.
My brain has been bracing for days,
but I don't have the perspective
to say anything.

It's a nice way to begin the song, but it kind of got me confused until i started reading more. The second and third lines are excellent. Good use of alliteration throughout this whole stanza.

My cage is caving in, but I can't scream at all
I've already accepted that the ends justify the means
It took the panic skreiks around me to teach me i'd done wrong,
Still passion is dust in the wind when you play with wits all day.

The second line of this puts other things out of place. It is a good line by itself but doesn't quite fit for this. I'd try putting in something before it or maybe placing it somewhere else in this stanza. I really love the last line.

And my head hits the ground as the experiment that went wrong.
Former leader, current scapegoat, clears the conscience of them all.
Embodied with true spirit my heart never excepts failure,
And I despise all the fools that think this will bring them closure.

The piece takes a pretty big change in this lats stanza. I like the use of epithets in the second line, it really makes the form reflect the content of the writing. I think in the third line it should be "accepts failure". Nice way to end it as it relates back to the beginning of the piece.

Great job with this, just go back and make some revisions and it will be fine.

[SixStringKing]

i expected it to be a WWII based writing :(

[IOWNU200]

yeah, that would've been way too clever for me to think of though :(...

[slack]

I'm still sorting out what it all means, but it sure was enjoyable to read. It's certainly not prosey--which isn't a bad thing anyway--but it has a conversational style I really like. It seems to be about suicide, with lines like "My brain has been bracing for days" and "...my head hits the ground", but I'm not sure whether it's about the concept in general, or a certain person's death.

Line four kind of sounds awkward, maybe you could rearrange it as "The surrounding silence always seems to steal my voice"; lot of s-sounds, almost too much. Not too fond of "bitter cold night" either because it's double-modified. These are all nitpicks, though; I seriously can't find much wrong with it.

This line, "Former leader, current scapegoat, (it) (I'll) clear(s) the conscience of them all" is a little on the sketchy side, grammatically speaking. Maybe add in one of the words in parenthesis and make appropriate changes elsewhere.

Former leader puzzles me. I can't figure out who that refers to, or if it's the narrator, who the narrator is, or if he's an important historical figure or whatever.

That's all I got. Good stuff.

[IOWNU200]

Okay to clarify this:
the narrator is being sentenced to death. although i only allude to it in the piece, I based it around Guy Fawkes. I exaggerated a little in the terms of him having major support, but hey i get those sorts of advantages when I'm writing the piece.

[-:Vincent:-]

Oohhh. I can understand it a lot better now. Maybe you should try making that theme a little stronger in the piece. I'm not sure how you'd accomplish this though, just change some words, or perhaps add a whole stanza. Depends on if what you want, you could just keep it below the surface like that. Of course, I'm not that observant, so maybe others would see it.

[Sloth]

Well seeing what you had in mind certainly cleared some things up for me. Before, I only had a vague idea of what you meant.

In the first stanza, the line "This bitter cold night is my impending doom," is my only complaint. I think it should be completely reworded. "Bitter cold night" not only is very cliche, but doesn't add anything to the piece, there's no emotion coming from it. And "impending doom", I don't know if it's a coinsidence or if it's the LC word, but I've been seeing "doom" a lot lately. It's not a great word and it bothers me. I think you are able to choose something else that would work. Maybe scratch the line and replace it with something that further explains what's going on, without just saying "oh poop I'm being sentenced to death", ya know what I mean?


My cage is caving in, but I can't scream at all
I've already accepted that the ends justify the means
It took the panic skreiks around me to teach me i'd done wrong,
Still passion is dust in the wind when you play with wits all day Before I read what it's about, I didn't like this stanza...but now it makes sense. I love the alliteration. You don't go over the top like a lot of people do when trying to use it


And my head hits the ground as the experiment that went wrong.
Former leader, current scapegoat, clears the conscience of them all.
Embodied with true spirit my heart never accepts failure,
And I despise all the fools that think this will bring them closure. The last few words to that first line feel aweful to me. Please reword it! Also, Slack pointed out the 2nd line trips.
I really like the last line... it's a great way to end this piece.

Overall, nice piece. :thumb:
It's good to see you're still writing! :thumb: again
Nice use of alliteration. Just some issues that can easily be corrected with some slight rewording