ILX Poetry Competition | 2020 Edition

Uncloaking Device

What if venom kept the skin plump?
Hypervigilance the hollows from sinking
into Deeper Acceptance™?
The sullen pallor of the blandly defenceless
levels a reckoning within that won’t make the headlines
much less the promised land

Defanged, a worm

The systematic shedding of technicolour armoury’s so bourgeois
Am I to believe
beige is more nutrient-rich?
It’s a tough sell, but I’ll invest in it
if there’s a reflection to be found in the yeast

The baked escapism of real conglomerate superheroics
can vibe in my insides
I loved the bit when the character knew what everyone was thinking with infallible certainty and
also how they kissed in the air
And my love is a facsimile?
Fuck you all
No, hush gauche ghost
We see what we want in whatever’s in front of us
A mirror, yes,
not always the hammer turned inwards to pound
and pound and

Flagrantly contravening the deadline here, but if more entries are to be accepted then I thought I might as well submit. Always happy to read everyone’s efforts and vote either way.

Paging mister treeship. Your thread is on the phone.

If you'll have me I can also slip a poem in. I've written a lot this year.

Please do.

Just to be clear, btw, the extra stanza I wrote is absolutely NOT part of my second poem and shouldn't be included on the voting thread

Treeship should give stragglers another few days imo

Distances

I am of the generation that invented chillwave,
That stretched ironic distance into a chasm
And fell through.

Wistfulness is artfulness, we thought;
Through strobe light punctured darkness
We chased the memories of others,
But it was our own empty hands we cherished
A measure of profundity.

These days, though, I don’t need to look too far
To find the ground beneath my feet,
And I wonder what I hoped to find
Inside those quiet distances.

We can vote if you guys want. I’ll make the poll. How about I give people another week to submit, especially Mordy.

I enjoyed reading all of these entries by the way. There are very talented writers on this board.

more poems? anyone?

Will post later today

dreaming of the future

for the sake of grist we sift through detritus
landfills for archeological digs of alien species
so thoughtful they accumulated all these primary sources
get yer phd equivalent at habitable exoplanet gliese 667 Cc
trappist monks on trappist-1d and
tea time is 12 on teegarden c
remember when we used to dream of populating these galaxies and now
we dream of greenery and the time that mangey fox got into our background
and the dog scared him away and you were laughing
and calling “leave him alone the poor thing”
the kids noses on the glass windows
as the insect biomass dropped
birds falling from the sky prophesying our own imminent demise.
i scoured the news for hope and learned how to wire a generator
as dystopia insurance.
let them see our works I’ll ozymandias plastic bottles and
shreds of poetry written on the back of large sheets of childhood crayon scrawls
dearly beloved i write one day you may read this
in corporal flesh or spirit alone
my progeny who i’ve never met are you shuffling through grocery store bag wastelands
or setting up radar stations on Luyten b
nestled in Canis Minor
is there mangey anything where you live
or nothing at all -
does my voice call to you across these generations like my progenitors called to me
do you pray do you sing do you worry about your children
our legacy was less than an echo
or maybe you

In plots regaled by flippant vandals

In plots regaled by flippant vandals
any sparrow sings then halts as you approach.
What of sloppy tubes running, rearing their legs
given what some call the past a diurnal memorial
wearing a brick smock, thus in appearance:
year of the stripped screw,
one jagged finger
in the pail catching roof water,
six subject titles of ongoing threads.
Less an inch from my damn face
is air or a reasonable alternative.
I would love a bite of your lava cake
afflicted as I am by ongoing cycles of spew
and cool in sun.

We are ultimately flimsy

We are ultimately flimsy
hotdogs getcher hotdogs
foreclosed in that sense
stuck in the ravines
we constructed but unable to cry
or comprehend our lack of marrow,
how we once scooped it out of ourselves like little canoes in a wilderness
where to cry was lit and we were undressed.
My pouty lips made you sad and we were without clothes, laconic,
ready to strafe our notions of will in our birthday suits.
Birthmark on my inner thigh, a healthy ration
of scars inedible despite your tonguing
that makes for laughter, shaking
my memory will waste its sweetness always
on misallocation of my senses rising
toward outer orbs and you, damned
like me in a bush wiping
sweat from neck down.

Solons solemn as camels pass

Solons solemn as camels pass
Makers slammed in car door flap
Cigar box contents crux of suit
Toothsome mincemeat big surprise

Tension breaks as rafter spotted
Tiny schoolgirl dominates bee
Benches empty as bean thrown
Kingpin snared in syrup sting

Rates rebound as bears retreat
Bridge snafu is laid to cable
Hapless hurler driven from mound
Cannon honored in Lions' fete

Teens nabbed in secret goofball ring
Love birds dip in thermal spring

Like that, Aimless

It's a sonnet. Sorta. I just wanted to catch treesh's sleeve.

i land

the waves roll in
from newfoundland
and hit oldfoundland
and head. away again
from cathedral cliffs and even keel
do wha, do girt, do we ga?
do never!

the sound of the bridge at the sound
big hill and big stone and old town and little me
simple names have simple truths
a bull's mouth thats a tide and a valley thats a hill
sure what's literature anyway
but translation that stuck
because it sticks or because it works
burnish til its ours, its what we got, its all we'll get
names and language and history

still and all
I miss the bloody place
what it is, and what it is to me

what i am to it remains a mystery

I'm thinking I'll hijack this, if treeship doesn't take over in the next few days. In the meantime, new entries are invited, because, why not?

I had plootered here so often
That I had become a sleepwalker,
A solemn investigator of futile things. 
But this afternoon the land tilted
Moving like a sleeping cat;
I was disembogued, come again to an old place.
It was like I had re-learned language
Or grown my eyes anew,
Reading, as if for the first time,
A secret I'd years ago hidden within myself.

I'd stood here in winter's abeyance,
Immured in a quilted bedchamber
And written 'love' in the dusting of snow,
Taking a photo with your camera.
I'd wanted you to midwife its thin pale birthing,
But need or ceremony or obligation
Took hold and now it lies in the dark
A geometry in an absence,
A peace treaty signed in secret
By only one side.

^pain of absence, distilled

It's looking more obvious every day that treeship has orphaned this thread, so I am proposing I take it to completion. Under the new regime, entries will be welcomed with enthusiasm until sometime roughly on or about midnight on January 31, 2021. Just figure on your local time, plus a bit of fudging. I'll assemble the ceremonial poll of ilx (mostly just the poets, if tradition holds) soon afterward.

Thanks for taking this on Aimless

Its a brutal business, Big Poetry, and only the toughest survive

thanks for taking this on, aimless. i haven been busy with things, new job and getting married, and this just kind of dropped. not cool of me but glad the vote will still go through.

new job and getting married

well, since you put it that way, I guess you're forgiven

Pfft ive seen the announcement snuck in slyer than that around here tbh

(grats)

love your saints piece Aimless

you can tell it is old because it mentions phone booths, which were still a thing when I wrote it

Reminder: only a short time left to the Jan 31, midnight (or thereabouts) deadline.

"Différance"

The take you shared, the hot one,
the one that’s roaring through the corridors of discourse
lopping off heads and limbs in a frenzy of
Enlightenment —

The take that’s taken you away from me,
carried you on a wave of blood
into the arms of a swarthy Frenchman —

Should I even say it?
Would you believe me if I said
that I'd arrived at this take before,
completely independently?

It came into my line of vision,
a burning star, a supernova:
I turned and ran and escaped.

But now, my love, it’s caught you by the ankles
and sucked you under the door.

rip

last stop before the end of the line

The competition is now officially closed. I'll prepare a poll thread later today for the voting. Because poets crave recognition, even if only from each other.

Thanks for your work here, Aimless

Poll thread here:

2020 ILX Poetry Competition: VOTE HERE

Please note I screwed up in transcribing the entries, failing to separate the end of imago's second poem and the start of JHM's second poem. The true copies are included here in this thread.