Thursday, September 22, 2011

Contest entries (so far) part ten

Bill 9:31pm

 At first sight,
the kiss
was simply irresistible,
a treasure
forever.

The truth of the matter,
it was innocent,
a stone's fall
into thin air


















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Patty 9:59pm

 With a FINAL SCREAM
I shout, I'M NOT HER
But you are unmoved and show NO MERCY.
Your INKHEART, twisted and bitter, will NEVER LET ME GO
And I know IF I STAY, I am – like ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
Only PREY.


SWEET REVENGE taunts me in my PURGATORY CHASM
Where there is only you growing FIFTY SHADES DARKER
And me, SWALLOWING DARKNESS,
Praying for an end to THE ETERNAL PRISON
In which you've chained me like some IRON KING,
NUMB, while I wait for THE END that never comes.



















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Catherine 9:59pm


Yours was an Autumn Death
and at the Summoning
come, Bury Your Dead,
I was Taken by the Flood of tears.
you are The Dead & The Gone
and The Disappeared,
and I am Split.
It was The Cruelest Month
that I did hear, Bird by Bird,
a flock that did Roar
and was Gone from my horizon,
it was The Brutal Telling
of Changes in store.
as if a Book of Poisons
was penned with the Red Ink of my soul,
I was bade to Touch the Dark,
there are no more Sources of Light.
there is only The Vast Memory of Love
to rustle this Still Life.
that you could be The Forgotten Man,
or that I am to see the Eclipse of me by
the downing of your Curtain,
I only ask you Wait For Me.
















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Jessica 10:29







































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Rose 11:49pm


 "Notes from No Man's Land"



“NOTES FROM NO MAN’S LAND:
A THOUSAND SPLENDID SUNS cannot
reach the DARK DEEPS
of our BLACK POWDER WAR.
WE THE ANIMALS traded
NEW DREAMS FOR OLD and began
our contest of PEOPLES VERSUS STATES,
soldiers versus the nearest empire.
Our king promised A VICTORY OF EAGLES,
saw THE TRANSIT OF VENUS in heaven and declared:
‘We will be an EMPIRE OF IVORY,
we will glitter under SUNSHINE and STARDUST.’

“THE IRRATIONALIST!
We found only poison, FIRE AND HEMLOCK.
War is a SOUL MIRROR, and our LIKENESS in it
is HALF EMPTY. Half the kingdom fights
for the king’s BLUE SWORD, the half
left behind is an INVISIBLE NATION.
We murmur, ‘TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN…’
Our soldiers look to be legends,
but they find only DRAGON BONES and
DRAGON BLOOD, the legends themselves long dead.”

“DEAR PRUDENCE,”
my mother interjects, “What are you DOING?”
“ENGLISH,” I mutter. “BY MYSELF.”




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Teresa 12:39am

Anthem to Sweet Ruin

 
The issue at hand is obscured
by what I imagine Satan says,
by the northern lights
decorating the home
of the wellspring,
by the divine misdemeanors
of the female brain, and of course,
by what lies under the mansuit—
the body, leaping poetry
the mind, villa incognito, shifting
any bones set against the drift.
 
Despite laughing it off
with good poems
and the loose sugar
of praise,
with the fuel
of sun under wood—
different voices catch in the throat
like swallowing stones,
or the ballistics
of playing in the dark.
 
I shiver under another
baptism of desire, a jailbird
at the eye of the world, knowing
that like me, the white deer
in the garden of heaven
is nothing to you, nothing more
than a shadow rising
windblowne and thirsty.
 
The white shroud
of the bone game renders
crucial conversations irrelevant,
furniture in the museum of accidents.
Even in such places as memory,
knowing I’m breaking the rules,
harming others with this stranger music, knowing
there’s a hole in my pocket
I pay the tithe.
 
It’s an emergence,
an eddy through plainwater, an admission:
I love dirt.
Fool on a hill,
grass for his pillow
and still I rise
toward this house of sky—
toward this need to strike sparks
even when you are engulfed in flames.



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AE Brooksby 12:49am

The Quest

Diego and Dora's Animal Adventure like
Five Quarters of The Orange,
began in A Year of Fog.
It was Misery in
A Thousand Acres strewn with
Les Fleurs du Mal.  They thought it would be
Per Sempre but the sight of
Brunelleschi's Dome impelled them to
cross the County Line
where they found the Key of Light.





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5 comments:

Kitty said...

JR, you posted Bill's poem (9:31) for "Patty 9:59."

Tina said...

Wow! By Part 10, after reading all the poems you have had to read, I am sure that Part 1 is all but forgotten :o)

Janet Reid said...

erp! Thanks Kitty! Fixed now!

angie Brooksby-Arcangioli said...

I agree with Tina but there was one that stuck in my head so far from one of the last entries.

Janet Reid said...

I go back and read each entry again, usually more than once, and make notes. Then I start the winnowing.

Parts 1-9 are not forgotten!