SCP Foundation

Some good, strong phrases include:

Friends. It was a painting done by friends.

This is the speaker revealing their madness — whether their stability was battered away by emotional trauma or they were not exactly sane to begin with, the reader is left to wonder.

Scars on cold metal.
Painted Red.

For me, the color formatting was a little over the top. Word choice wise though, this is a very tactile and immediate experience of the speaker's surroundings and in that sense it does well.

I do have to agree with Bright that narratively speaking there's very little going on here, however. I get the impression that by "the Doctor" you're referring to SCP-049. He's popular and as a result very overused, and he's the only thing in this draft which can specifically tie the poem to the Foundation. That, I think is the biggest weakness of this piece.

black white black white black white black white black white gray definitely is a great place to start. One could certainly read it as a prose poem, and it does capture the mood you were aiming at in this draft in greater complexity. A big part of the reason for its success, as I understand it, was a cultural shift among authors. The old in-universe "kill them regardless after a month" D-class policy bothered a lot of people as morally unacceptable and logistically impossible. That piece encapsulated feelings many people shared which were motivating them to imagine and write about the Foundation in a different way. So its powerful reception came from capturing a zeitgeist which existed at comparable strength on both sides of the fourth wall — a rare event, unlikely to be repeated any time soon.

Another excellent piece which can be read as prose poetry is 01110101 01101110 01100010 01110010 01101111 01101011 01100101 01101110. It is written from the perspective of the Broken God, and is a combination of lore exploration, in-universe religious document, and real-life philosophical meditation. At 55 upvotes, I think that's on the high end of what a poem is likely to get, if catalyzing external factors aren't present.

But the blunt fact is that many readers are simply not going to be interested in poetry, because it's not what they're interested in. As I see it, reading and appreciating a poem requires the reader to re-create the reality it conveys within their own mind and emotions in a more intimate way than a tale, and a much more intimate way than an SCP. Since readers are coming here to have narrative experiences about the SCP Foundation universe, a poem will have to successfully give them the tools to have that intimate experience within the narrative frame. Those who aren't currently interested but might become so if a piece piques their interest will likely follow that route. Tag Search articles tagged "poetry" to have a look at things that have worked over the years!

One suggestion I have for envisioning future poems is to take a character or sequence of events from a recent SCP or tale as your starting point. Maybe even have it be a poem written in-universe by a character. I recently did this in my Art Exchange gift. It didn't get a ton of upvotes, and truthfully I didn't expect it to; the person I made the gift for liked it and that was what mattered.

I know I've already mentioned my best friend, Tag Search, but here I'd also like to mention my other best friend: Thesaurus.com.

The diction for this draft is short sentences, as if someone barely clinging to consciousness or coherence is seeing these events and is barely able to communicate what they're seeing. In a conceptual sense, it's as if the narrator is viewing the action through a keyhole. Their vision is extremely tightly focused and brings the reader these little snatches of sensation, which ideally combine to piece together a narrative whole.

Partly for this reason, I do not like the extraneous capitalizations. "Foxes" makes sense as that's the title of a group. "Doctor", "Scars" etc do not add anything for me, and actually detract. You've said the doctor is not 049, and they're certainly not the Doctor (aka Dr Who). I have to step out of the poem and consciously remind myself of this fact every time I see "the Doctor." The other capitalizations are similarly distracting, even without accidental references.

It feels like the intent of the capitalizations is to emphasize these aspects of the scene and make them more vivid. I believe that could be done more effectively by describing the characters and scenery using different words or phrases. Ye trusty thesaurus is valuable for this!

One exception might be "cold metal." This phrase is a central one around which the poem's action revolves and to which it returns. Seems to me you're using it as a kenning to refer to the Foundation facility as a whole. Having "cold metal" remain changeless while the descriptions of most other things vary from line to line would set up a contrast between it and the other, chaotic elements of the scene.

Another possible contrast you could use is between the cold of the metal and other things described as having warmth. Hot breath, warm (sticky?) red, the heat of battle, hot pursuit, fiery rage etc.

Keeping that "keyhole" focus will help to zoom in on the tactile and visual details in the scene. What are the scars like — jagged, precise, deep, shallow, frenzied, deliberate? How does the red move, how does it feel, how does it smell?

To summarize what I'm seeing of the story in the poem:

There's a doctor who was trying to survive or contain the breach. They were injured — "Trembles. Steps." was a great description of this. The entity smells, pursues and kills them.

Epsilon-11 arrives on the scene. I checked out Lockdown Procedures, and it looks like they're likely to be called in as first responders to breaches coded Blue (mobile entity with less than human sapience) and Superblue (mobile entity with sapience at or above human). That's excellent. Based on the action, I get the impression this was a Code Blue — an anomalous monster which is about as smart as a very smart animal. So that could be another crosslink and another way to bring in the cold / hot dichotomy. The entity paints red and is associated with heat; the MTF is responding to a Code Blue and is cool, collected and precise.

The Foxes show up and see the carnage. The entity perceives and gives chase. The MTF slays the beast and drags its neutralized corpse off to be contained.