2014 ILX Poetry Contest: The Captain Lorax Prize (Submissions Thread)

THE RULES ARE SIMPLE:

"the poem must be 4 - 40 lines. That doesn't include line breaks or the title. One entry per person. Post your entry here. I'll move them all later when the poll starts"

a bunch of poems enter, one poem leaves, and we all remember the speaker for the trees fondly

Deadline is October 1, please submit no more than 2 poemz

Adieu Monsieur Coyote!

Night falls like a curtain,
a gentle veil, the merciful
obscurities of love.

Daylight drops from the sky
like a piano. Boom.
The schadenfreudic boom.
A nation's thirst for justified
comeuppance.

Heaven's anvil renders your
Repose,

But hold your applause till
I affirm your sense of victimhood.

Boom.

^ breaks fast, shows early foot

irresolute

in your voice i hear
your petulant, put-upon pout

you’re talking about food;
i’m starving

pursed lips hold firm
from the brink of solipsism

if i screamed right now
we’d alight

embers dissipating, atomistic
fluttering on the breeze as fireflakes

but, irresolute,
our slumped shoulders, arms akimbo

body of evidence suggests
division

pinching hairs out from their sockets
peeling thin layers of skin

the hastening of regeneration
a digital delay knob spun to maturity/martyrdom

upon repeat, your note sounds flat
against the foreground of new voices

I Don't Know Why It Does This

My brain comes up with
weird nicknames
for famous people
Hartison Fortison
Robben Wibben
I don't know why it does this

Yet I have no such names
for the people
I see everyday

Tamping

the stewardess
in morning asks
my drinklike
and I

say
“please’m Turkey,
of
the Wild.”

“oh and um”
adding
“not an ice,
for pleasing.”

she eyebrow raise
think low of me.
me is and am,
and are to be.

it's a little funny to see that and then a dash and "BIG HOOS aka the steendriver"

Evil Doppelganger

Since my first day here
you've made it very clear
that you think I'm incompetent
a pointless peasant pissant
I don't know what I've done
to bring your hatred on
Except remind you of yourself
when you were in better health

Maybe it's because you're my evil doppelganger

Despite our broad similarity
You're lacking in empathy
Woefully deficient in intellect
Difficult questions you deflect
Maybe I should feel sorry for you
and all the nasty schemes you do
But then I catch my sympathy
because you're lacking humanity

Maybe it's because you're my evil doppelganger

This job is a compromise for me
but it's the best you'll ever see

The Hippogriff Builds Its Nest

You know (you must!) that well-known unknown tree,
so tall and straight within its inspecific woods,
that fell one unnamed day, as we, absorbed
in other things, perfected our fine ignorance,
inapt to say it made the noiseless noise
it made.

O, most provoking tree!
Suggestive, hintful, plausible tree,
inhabiting an anteroom of my aesthetic
I cannot enter without shame, fear and hope.
Why can't you be a hippogriff?

A garbled monster, easily laughed down,
or sidled away from, consigned to low unreality,
your condign home, where I as a child
wiggled my several toes in the paradise
of fools?

Stubborn tree, unflinching, doubtless dead,
You're still the stuff of houses, home of nests,
that cannot be built, though built they are
and lived in, as I seem to do, imperfectly,
as well befits an ignorance not perfected.

just a periodic bump, so that potentially interested parties may become aware of it

who put the bump

turn bump for what

I posted this in the thread that died. here, have a rewrite.

The Aftertaste of Birth

Witness magnificent viaducts!
stuttered I while she I
scissorfucked aimlessly.

You should have started elsewhere, oversharer.

Senators open letters chockablock with ricin but
why not mandrake, or wolfsbane?
Mark E. Smith knew his haruspex from his anthrax
though admittedly a great
flabby flapping cunt was he.

Am I not a man? Do I not LOL?
Maybe Father was right.
It's a numbers game, and:
I should just stick to my cards.

True miracles happen every day
but now you're insisting
everything's already been said
and said better by others.

Why denigrate what you do not understand?
It's preferable to understand nothing.
That's what works for most people.

Some people won't stop saying
in today's world.

In today's world
some people are always the problem.
In today's world
some people never learn

and those are the ones we hate.

Give us Barabbas
they cry out in the darkness
dragging curdled faces
behind the twilight
like cold masks in the park.

Forsooth. Forsooth.
I bet you don't even know what that means.

It means close your browser.
We're done here.

i like it. if you had asked me after the first paragraph to guess, i would've sworn lj wrote it.

wasn't that an entry last year

you expect me to write something new in a year's time? good god, I'm not a machine.

i like about three fifths of it

honestly I can only support two fifths of it but I try to save my best work for college basketball message boards

fair

we're now to 7 entries with 20 days to go

bomp

joe tex single

I'll submit again this year if I write something, fair?

much better to write something to submit, then post it before you have much time to think about it. this is my usual modus operandi

never said I'd think about it tbf

"Small Bump" is a song by British singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, released as the fifth single from his debut studio album, +. The song was written by Sheeran and produced by Jake Gosling. The single peaked at number 25 on the UK Singles Chart.

I'm on it but I'm also on vacation ffs

take your time!!!!!!!!! it is an all purpose bump

while i try to think of a title for this thing i wrote for this thread i realize that there's no such thing as a good title, just titles that are less stupid than other titles which is to say less offensive which really becomes a problem when you'd like to offend

titles pshaw

How about "And the Horse You Rode In On"?

but when i submit it w/out a title it gets (fairly) retitled as "untitled" which i don't like much either

call it untritled

"Bob Dylan's Dream #666"?
"Brick Upside Your Head"?
"Take Offense. Please."?

i usually like the tactic of using the first line in quotation marks as the title

"inside of a poem its too dark to read"

grammatically adventurous, too ^

"anodyne,"

anodyne, alkaloids convalescing, thebaine there but for the grace of god
at night we dream of enola gay, irradiated chemtrails and your touch when we
grasp one another gasping locutionary acts: hold me,
i find peace in your touch.

shifting through transparent silica broadcasting battered missives,
checking our tissues for ebola, foreheads for hemorrhagic fever
our kidneys shut down lazy Sunday afternoons as we grapple
for one another slowly going blind.

katyusha fireworks, we read each other formal verse punctuated
by fajr-5 and the endless hours while we were just shadows your
body is prose and i place my nose against your neck seeking eupnea,
giggling, we forget our names.

and stay there

shouldering each a burden of a sixth of the lost at the last
through mosses, crosses, grasses, reeds, crooked concrete passes
cursing famine graveyards' slant and the stony famine hills they haunt
and stony village faces mouthing stony funeral masses
down fifteen cruel and damned degrees in wet and sliding borrowed soles
pulled and pushed and crushed by weight and haunted by the funeral tolls
and every second thinking that no matter how we go
we'd one then all fall, trip or slip on hidden cillini rocks
and the every man-jack of us downhill-tumbling show
would end with a ring of broken crowns and jill sprung out the box

two minutes, two hours, a lifetime, then earth
lowered, prayed, stayed, thanked diggers and crew
shook hands by the side of the dark single berth
and then left, having done the least we could do

:O

the men's rights crew can write a fucking poem it seems

dmac that is...that's...i mean...

I...did not enjoy that tbph

you've thrown yr soul onto the page, and we may there sup

a lovely

I have the writers regret re the last minute title I put on that. what odds of changing before posting to other thread. maybe even changing ITT.

title works brilliantly im irrelevant o

Deadline is October 1, please submit no more than 2 poemz

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, September 2, 2014

model of concision

here's one more why not

Darling We Are Aging

darling we are aging in mornings
wrapped around each other at dawn
like a car embracing a tree trunk.
we wander through the forests of our
barking dreams, walking off whiskey
and thirsting in our sleep as the
day bleeds in through the incense window.
an owl cries out and i open my eyes.

you immaculate lit by the stereo glow,
eyes closed and searching, searching.
the needle stuck in a loop on the
record player. the songs have
ended and now there is only your
breathing and a click, click, click.

Not really an official entry, so much as a momentary self-amusement, inspired by a thread title:

The Poetry of ILX

The poetry of ILX reviles mayonaise,
and flings its zings cornucopiously,
wears warts, sings, jigs, exhales a fetid haze,
advances ever onward, seldom flees.

The poetry of ILX honors the fire,
finds chickenbears where before none were,
seeks some sad solace in glimming The Wire,
and all around projects a sharp-edged blur.

The poetry of ILX would eulogize dead slebs,
or castigate them just as much as you might please;
it oft rejects the quiddities of debs
and cheerfully wallows in ironic sleeze.

So doth our ILX bestride this silly world
a daddy-long-legs of collosal thoughts.
But if the truth were truthfully unfurled,
it was much more poetic in The Aughts.

hey darraghmac that was great

thanks!

September 24, 2014

it is 2014 and i am in philadelphia.
but in a more profound sense i am on the internet
with you, and it is 2009, because i am not with you,
and can't be, because i lack inner resources.

wise men know when to let go,
their poems are not this frantic and enjambed.
their minds are like still reflective ponds and not
like herds of sentimental elephants, contradicting and
trampling all over what's important. but wait

i want to share something with you. it's
very stupid. it's about love. and time is a palimpsest
but it's me who's fading

into you like the song or else
i'm the one who's here.

time's a wasting. 30 days hath September and all that jazz.

HOoS I sent u an ilxmail

oh that prob didn't work tbh its an old mail

send me a fb msg?

k

HAD WE BUT WORLD ENOUGH AND TIME

October 1 in what part of the world? Darn. I have something but I'm couch-surfing until tomorrow.

Just toss it on the pile when you have a chance. At least you can be sure it will get read.

STOP ALL THE CLOCKS

lol I forgot this

yall have the stage

huh, don't we still have until the end of the day on October 1? that's the way deadlines usually work.

oh i didn't mean ~i'm unilaterally stopping the contest now~ i'm just pointing out today's the day

gonna have to bank mine for next year's since it's not quite done and i have approx 20 hrs of work to do today

xpost: ok, gotcha

no pressure now

before i sleep i'm going to type something up directly into this box and submit it (well, if i think it has a prayer against dmac's, otherwise nah)

dmac set a damned high bar, but I say he needs us as foils, so it would only be polite to oblige him by setting his stuff next to our lesser stuff that sets his off to best advantage.

Against Complete Withdrawal

negotiation phase

on soft sunny fading days
and through people
cling on, sour godhead

but in frantic aspiration
and to these events
feign lively boredom

for the mill-ground teeth
of conversations declined
frame instability a corrective

crisis phase

categorical suicide
zones and their gerundive
'must be withdrawn from'

however hover kneebent
for dysphoric relapse:
fire wilts at the joint

thrown down in
my own ash
unwoven loving

renegotiation phase

a little further back
from corneal immediacy
spaceless ambitions

recover absent breath
leave sensors responsive
heart sceneries dead slow

i am here but
there are conditions
and a terminal door

I like that

XP i pity the foil

pity the foil is ace

ok bluds in the next day or so i will put all of these into a new thread with voting opciones

.

?

deems did you miss the voting thread or something?

yeah srsly

grats on 2nd place tho

I've been on a rock with no internet it was magnificent tbh hi btw

Bummer contendo couldnt have caught this year's bus

hi! that's no way to talk about new york xp

8080 rock

hi guys sorry for my tardiness, busy weekend--can work on this shortly!

remember when we used to do these

bring that beat back imo

we useta write things in this country.

now everyones got his hand in the other guys pocketbook.

i'm already running a poll atm. someone else should start a thread!

I'm away from home rn, but when I get back I may launch a 2019 Poetry Contest, if no one has done so already.

^do it! It's National Poetry Day in the UK...

TS: Simon Armitage vs Rupi Kaur

Who pens the trvest poëtree?

always wisest to remember
though rough winds doth shake the darling buds of may
soon comes november
and dont no-one give a fuck about national poetry day

i'm game...!

OK. I did it.

2019 ILX Poetry Competition: Open Division