2019 ILX Poetry Competition: Open Division

Lots of excellent things in this thread. I wrote this back when I was alive. Formally, it's a bit fucked but well.

Ranging in twilight’s palsied silver, at the summit of autumn’s blaze.
Acorn litter, balled under arches –
Demosthenean props, rolled around the woods’ bronzed gape.
Beyond this, nothing is said.
Instead, we go undeceived, suspended in the updrafts of the old silence.

Rooks roil westward, lint in the eye of the sun’s liquid falling.
We crouch at a field edge, thick with dewy foreshadows;
you gather chestnut husks, the needles lancing your palms.
Then: a studied tilt, a new pressure behind your eyes, and there
not ten feet away, belly-deep, scrape-hidden, a deer. A deer.

Before, I’d carry you out, out to sleep off the afternoon’s bright daydreams,
and the deer would always come. They were your anxious, peering avatars,
come to see this strange two-fronted stalker abroad in their crucible of beech-caught light.
Once, walking through a pixellated summer night, a deer watched us home,
A distant, timid chaperon of dusk’s rough palisades.

Now, as the woods shrink, as time shrinks, acre by sodden acre, they come less frequently.
But I feel them, a soft presence at the edge of things,
a modest, unspoken rapture.
We gather each other, and for the briefest moment I wonder if you’re going to stay.
Not yet, I think; not just yet.

Your River, My River

You wanted a river
classically organised
explicable in every tongue and
not burdened or bridled with
oil and tar
A lovely great groundswell
of that old terror beauty
A beauty to be fit over the face
as a veil
of golden, shimmering reverence

I flew apart everywhere
casting sackfuls of sawdust
into unspeakable crevices
Acupuncture horizon
got its god-fearing back broken
right down the seam
I held the split
atwixt a crumbling endpiece
and shouted into it
for your river

Waiting, I listened
Static flashing on and off
like the primeval beginning
of cinematic entombment
Aeons buttered my feet
and then one day I heard it
A focal shifting
and the light
moved
like
this
with big balmy pulses
A diagonal triangulation
on what we had taken
to be river

Here it was then
For you
but really for me
Rippled gunshots in all directions
A crinkled ugly
too horrible to bear
and overdosing on sun
No life
No Wordsworth
But enough liquid matter
to flood
all the droughts in the world

TOE HELL WITH REALITY

Blab blab BLAND sockaroo
I ingest WE INGEST seventeen CRICKET INFESTED PONCHOS
martyrFUCKER
here's the real poem
today at the football just after they equalised
a wagtail flew over the stand
and I was like ah ok a pied wagtail
but it could have been a grey wagtail
and in the end i didn't know but it was
enough that it was a wagtail
this isn't the poem either is it

new tack: i'm listening to total eclipse of the heart
while watching a light aircraft approach landing
on a stream of the cricket, it is a doughty plane
now lady by styx on imperial command

versablutions
commodore inefficacies
the song is good hail howitzer
exactamundo, by gordon
slightly now i am writing a poem and it cannot end now
nu-gold dream drainage dripping
i beef you in writhes
we contangle a biscuit gauntlet

burrett
gondling
haxmet
corbucky
such are the names of elspeth and swot
you've become useless and unfiltered!
many rock stars have been or become sociopaths, NOT JUST REO SPEEDWAGON
the informations got worse
I tried to type got not for
PRODIGAL SON
i don't know

KEEP ON LOVING YOU but wait here's a GUMBUTTON

drunken

here's the real poem

the reeal one:

_
_
we will or won't fast-forward through dipmunks of

no that wasn't it either

the only truth i can communicate right now
is that if I truly understood and drank in the music
of the late 1970s and early 1980s
i would transcend myself and achieve everything
that i want to achieve
and you would too

and that the only truth of the next decade
is the truth of whoever makes ELO but of the 2020s

that is no longer my truth

okay here is the scenario
there are three wizards
one of them is Tolesmord
one Barthsy
one Gonfrak

Tolesmord says: "Ho my spell" and zorks a banister from his gunk
Barthsy yodels in four languages before producing a parcel of penises
Gonfrak is invisible to dogs.

All are competing!

A judger of wizard looms before them, cape a-ghast
They utter some words: "You are all so special,
But I order that the winner is GONFRAK"

And this is so unusual and out of order
because they all thought they were going to win equally
that the three wizards organise the following array:

Judger, BANISTER PROTRUDING FROM GUNK
is not only invisible to dogs but is being LICKED and MATED WITH (rude!)
even though the dogs do not know why they are mating
and actually they are yodelling

think on that as your world disintegrates like mine
think on that as you are consumed in language
think on that and of that and in that and through that and while that
is the thing you think of
as i say that you
are the martyr

By the powers vested in me by me, I declare the 2019 ILX Poetry contest closed to new entries. But of course this thread isn't locked and no one can be stopped from slipping some further poems over the transom. Special pleading, accompanied by breast-beating, sitting in ashes, or bribery may be employed by poets seeking inclusion in the final balloting -- and might possibly heeded. I'm a soft touch.

with the clock ticking so....

ive a clock ticking fifty seconds a minute
not a ten second gap at one end, or within it
nor spaced so the rhythms are even but slow
just ten odd-second gaps where a tick doesnt show

on the wall in the kitchen it hangs and it chides me
reminds me my time isnt filled as it should be
a man cannot sit and be still with such stutters
an audible heartbeat that randomly flutters

id been minded to bring to a sure resolution
this case of a-one-in-six-missed revolution
but a damnable fact that has turned out in time
is this odd missing tick suits my rhythm just fine

a fellas time cannot be pursed, is the message
into regular moments of dignified passage
that hours are more than the sum of their parts
whether fittingly fitful in stops or in starts

so it hangs as it hangs, and well hang it i say
what's a couple a thousand less ticks in the day
we'll offer them up to the god of the gaps
gift moments presented that land in our lapse

so many awesome posts

goddamn, deems. every year

says the guy who voted for mordy.

i dont forget.

yours and mordy's were the other best things to ever be in this maybe

id read a book of hellion mumble's stuff, and i wont read a book of anything usually tbh

there are forgotten heroes

Gatemouth did some truly staggering forgotten-hero work for instance, and then stopped posting

mordy's 2014 poem is the great one from the the archive if anyone is ever making a zine

careful, deems won't forget you said that ;)

in a smallshit factory town down west
the college is hosted macabrely
between st marys, where the nurses now train
(amongst the easier cases)
and teresas

johnny was easy. hed wander the campus
asking have ye fags, have ye fags- he was harmless
but startling

fergus another, he wandered around once
one thursday (id had an accounting exam)
saying i kilt a man
i kilt a man ah god help us i kilt a man

hed stabbed johnny five times in the back,
out the back
fergal probably shouldnt have been in st marys,
we reckoned

that was for easier cases

the other flank of my beloved alma mater
was teresas: secure, for the difficult cases.
secured to their beds
or secured by prescription
or secured in the first and last instance by mick
who was alright of a guy, all considered

i never got used to visiting teresas
but many years later, with clipboard and tie
i carried out duties vested in my person
by the county of mayo-god-help-us
and a fella climbed onto my car while i did so
and wouldnt come down til they threatened the doctor
and i thought

ive had worse visits to this fucking kip
that left worse dents and scratches
and at least this time its on the clock
and none of my brothers are crying

AI think it's time to set the deadline for entries: midnight (GMT) Saturday, November 23.

― A is for (Aimless), Monday, November 18, 2019 8:24 AM (five days ago)

According to my calculations, midnight had passed had passed at the Greenwich meridian when deems posted both of his poems to this thread. Personally, I am not averse to including them in the official balloting, but I throw open the floor to other participants who may feel aggrieved by darraghmac's flouting of the announced rules. Until I hear further, they are held in official limbo, pending adjudication.

Hint: Some sitting in ashes, or thoughtful bribery, might soothe the feelings of the other contestants.

serve me right

This morning, upon further thought, I remembered that flouting announced rules is vmic for poets, so any caviling would be ungenerous of us. You're in. I'll post a polling thread in an hour or two.

i knew pretenitence would do the job

Voting for your most-preferred poem may be done on 2019 ILX Poetry Competition: VOTE HERE.

Poets who vote for themselves will be judged in heaven upon a scale of perfect justice, but since all votes are anonymous let's just accept the eventual outcome as being uninfluenced by undue vanity. I'm just hoping there are more total votes than the eleven poets who saw fit to show us their poems. Good luck, y'all.

btw, you have invented a new and valuable word - well done, deems:

Your search - "pretenitence" - did not match any documents.

ack too late to submit - alas. next year i'll do better.

Have to work tomorrow
But will be back here again believe me
Once the barmaid options are exhausted
Back here to fucking decompose

(Aimless opens thread, expecting to find a decomposing calstars. Does not and is relieved.)

I forgot to say thank you to my voter!

And, by the by, via some weird cold clockwork of the stars, Christopher Fairbank ended up reading and recording my poem: https://soundcloud.com/mattpoacher/deer

it was me fwiw

pfft

Thanks imago.