2019 ILX Poetry Competition: Open Division

My wife has often asked me why I never write poems about our daughter. Today, sitting under a tree in the dunes near the ocean, I was reading Rexroth's translations of Tu Fu and they showed me a possible way to accomplish this, for me, difficult feat. So, this will be my second entry:

My Daughter's Misfortunes

My daughter's misfortunes seem never to end.
They accumulate beyond counting, beyond tears.
For three decades I have shared her struggles.
Her body is as near to useless as a body can be.
She cannot move herself, she waits to be moved.
She cannot speak, her mind is fathomless to me,
Yet sometimes her face can be read like a book.
She never laughs, a smile is the limit of her delight.
She never cries, for tears could bring her no relief.

In autumn a surgeon cut off part of her femur.
In winter she nearly joined the legion of ghosts.
In spring a permanent slit was put in her bladder
So that a tube might empty the urine from it to a bag.
For her, my wife, and I, these few bald lines
Describe nothing other than a daily truth,
The texture of her entire life and half of ours.

It is hard to tell others how it is we live.
Around strangers I dread their conventional questions,
Our mutual awkwardness as my poor answers are revealed.
But there is nothing here that is unspeakable.
On Sundays we all visit together without exception.
We lie down all three adjacent, close, familiar.
I place my head against her head, lightly touching,
And she relaxes hers to mine, accepting the contact.
For an hour or two there is space for contentment.
This one thing, more than any other, is how we live.

:) ;_; !

i have actually read those rexroth translations so i know exactly what you mean by them offering a path

While I'm here:

the deadline for submissions is some time vaguely around mid-November, 2019. This may change, depending on the weather, the number of submissions, and my judgment.

I'd say we need to extend this vague deadline for about another week or so, to gather in some of the strays who have been out galivanting instead of giving their muse the honor she deserves. But in fairness to those who submitted early, my indulgence for procrastination will not last forever, so all you poets, get to poetizing!

that is really moving, aimless, thank you

Okay, so I'll post a few from this project I've been working on.

6.

The people of Des Moines, Iowa, are no strangers
to economic upheaval.
It never goes out of style.
He cleared the pipe and passed it.
We all close like water, and once
this floodplain hitched to the coast, blubbering over the scape.

My observations inform me
his real ambition was to start a band
playing music in the vein
of Jimmy Buffett—
he liked the relaxed lifestyles, baby let's cruise
away from here:

"how to wreck a hard drive,"
"water damage to a notebook computer."
Just browsing, treading, it's not illegal
to not want to be found. It's been explained
repeatedly. The tourists are covered in crude,
the schoolchildren started to vomit
scanning for shore. Nothing on the cameras
perchance to dream how the film depicted
in light's painful rigor a thirst
unplugged, a handwritten note left
in the unremarkable room
where we burned our papers
and set off the alarm.
A crowd gathers
on a strip of grass.

3.
No wonder the dinosaurs
threw in the towel,
would for a softer ending, a coo at last light's
intense waveforms, but no, instead it's
the first time we've been forced to think
about how we fight war.

Is that the raclette or the diaper
of history bestirring my schnoz?

The aged loosen and it's a fright.
I palpate but the air is filled with zither music and
haggling in Vietnamese,
my intentions likely misplaced
as I tongue congee off a cleaver.

Snort all you want. Let's pretend we're viruses.

I call nipah and supply the mansions
with palm toddy, chucking thoat swabs
in the dustbin. Some were violent, and screaming;
they were pacified with injections.
I wanted to craft fictions.
It's a skull thump
on concrete.

finally, one from today:

7.

oops....

7.

A particularly telling symbol is an absence.
My shame is right on, then,
the spreading thorn
strapped and surfing copper
unease crisp a celebration
of life padding parking lots and structures'
demanded lineation, looking behind me lustily.

It was all dell, surrender surrender
in fluxed splendor the jumbo word find
a recursive embrace of hurt's spillage,
pump up the contrast the orders
a view dimmed to gruel.

ty, ttitt

I'm gonna bump this at least once a day for a few days.

Daily bump.

^

I think it's time to set the deadline for entries: midnight (GMT) Saturday, November 23. I'll cobble together the poll sometime soon after that.

On a Rooftop in Manhattan

The planes performed their dance above LaGuardia,
banking lightly into a slow descent.

Margaret regarded the procession with envy.
When she was younger she thought the whole world moved
like gears inside a clock, churning indifferently
around the mounting catastrophe of her life.

Someone told her that this fantasy was called libertarianism,
evoking images of gun shows and New Hampshire
that quickly dissipated into a mosaic haze.

Margaret had no judgments and no ideals
at this moment in time,
and she caught herself saying that fatigue was a kind of nihilism
when she meant to ask for another drink.

thanks, treesh. Last time there were 17 poems. yours makes 9 so far this time around. I'm hoping we can harvest a few more before Saturday.

one last bump before this thread shuts down over the weekend

poets! submit!

I need to get drunk and power something out in twenty minutes like usual

― imago

poets! start drinking!

I've already made an ass of myself. It's everyone else's turn now!

One last reminder:

If you can't come up with something original, plagiarize yourself from back when you still had interesting thoughts.

Just 'thoughts' will do at this point.

I dug up an Onegin stanza I left unfinished, but I just can't get it to work.

I left it unfinished ten years ago, I should say

That's OK. You're already a blood donor.

Slap '(A Fragment)' on it and call it a day.

But it's the middle part that doesn't work...

Replace it with '(…)'. Voilà.

i have pernod, i have blackcurrant

as if under three hours to deadline wasn't always the plan

Oh had I but a cup of coffee
or perhaps a mug of tea
my heart, which as of now is awfully
sad, would would fill with joy and glee.
My dim and incoherent thinking
would, with just a bit of drinking,
become beautiful and bright
and tell my fingers what to write.
I know now that the drought is ending,
as now is done my daily toil,
and on my stove water doth boil.
but woe... I shan't go on pretending...
One thing would be even more dear:
Oh had I but a glass of beer!

Ten years, guys. Or, twenty minutes back then, twenty minutes now.

new church Kidbrooke

I rode a new bus today, the 335 to Kidbrooke
they only introduced it a few weeks ago
and the announcements were broken -
instead of '335 to Kidbrooke' it said
'new. church! Kidbrooke'
so really it was like I was joining a cult and
route 335 was the cult
here's what happened next

but first about route 422, there's a
20-metre stretch of road in the middle
of the route where both the inbound
and outbound buses use the
same lane of the same road
in the same direction, that's the 422 lore
and now you know it too and
there's no way to not know it

so yeah this happened
the 380 goes past my house and
it seems to be more often much more often
than you'd expect from
the law of averages
that the inbound and outbound buses meet
at the crossroads i live on
and one of them has to stop to let the other past

by now i was ecstatic
to tell you about the 763
which doesn't exist yet but when it does
it will have a point on its route
where it has to do a three-point turn
in the middle of the traffic
while the driver sings
his favourite hymns and drums the wheel

so now i'm on the 8004
and we're flying into
~the hexagon~
which is where this route terminates
it is a beautiful place I hear
engines are running
you can queue for the next bus
there is ample shelter

music selection was The Chap and is now The Beta Band. I will write a second

you've all done fine poems btw but aimless' second is probably the best thing anyone's done for one of these? i'm drunk idk. aimless deserves this one, for everything tbh

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.