VEGANGELICA

Chris, your poems seem very thoughtful and optimistic to me. I liked these lines best:

"Tell me why do people lie and hate to hear the truth
We try to act oblivious and hide in fear of proof!"

"Cuz only beating down yourself will beat you in the end..."

and

"It's time to stick together, we all affect each other
I'll never leave a good man down, I'll never leave my brother."

^ Very sweet.

These lines, "So put a glimpse of faith in me and let me show you how I dream to make a difference and one day make you proud," remind me how helpful it is when someone takes a little of her or his time to pay attention to someone else and be supportive.

You use many incongruent images in your poems, which might be your hip hop sensibilities showing up in your poetry. For example, in "Smile for the Camera" you mention a fox, an abyss, possibly a gun (cock and reload), burning bridges, and autumn leaves. I prefer poems/lyrics that have one central image around which all the descriptions revolve, rather than poems that connect aspects of many different subjects, but that's just a personal preference.

The lines I found myself contemplating the most, which are the ones I felt were most poetic, are these:

"Life is the puzzle and I want the box
The picture, the vision that's sly like a fox
The fox remains gentle with delicate steps
Majestic when most see no elegance left."

I've heard people say before that life is a puzzle, so that wasn't new, but what I really liked was how you said you want the box. I imagined this as saying that you don't just want to understand how all the components of life fit together, but you want to have and see the box in which life came, where the box gets one a little closer to answering the question of why life or anything exists at all. The box in which a puzzle comes usually tells the maker, the date, the instructions, and so if life *were* a puzzle, it *would* be nice to have the box.

I also liked the image of the fox taking delicate, majestic steps. I don't fully understand how the fox imagery relates to the sly picture (of life) that you want to put together. Even though I didn't understand it, though, I liked this sudden, unexpected description of a fox.

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