Another week, another fine selection of poems for us to ponder over. This edition is possibly our most diverse yet as each podium-placer has a distinctively different style to the next. Check out our selections below and feel free to let us know if you disagree.
3rd Place
Nate Maxson – The Lamplighters
The lamplighters lit the lamps in the early days, those between steam and lightning (or romanticized as such)
The old days, not our old days but their old days
In the beginning,
For in the engine is a new genesis
In the cities
London, Paris, New York, Berlin: from whom will spring a multitude of lovely postcards
They lit them
In a circular motion, like the route a postal worker takes to deliver the mail
Every night with flint and footstools
They would follow their lights in a pattern
Trying to keep as many kerosene wicks under glass polygons
Bright,
The eventually pointless ritual is only made that way: in the eventual
The rhythm of those just trying to keep the lights on
Pardon me while I assume that what Macbeth really means when he speaks in a spiral of tomorrows
Is today,
And today
And today…
Against your own fictionality you can freeze time on a stage or preserve a slice of aeterna nox (how melodramatic, this phrase that came to me like a dream or a dagger when you expect it and brace for impact)
But it does make saying it a little bit more palatable,
I think…
How many stage plays have you seen where in the center of the stage they have, for the likes of Fred Astaire to dance around: a single street lamp?
Though we may be loath to admit it, he would have made a fine Macbeth
Because tyranny is for the dancers and America is for the machines
And now they’ve grown up, they no longer need a gardener
I consider that growing in the cracks of the cobble stones,
Was something very large moving away from me, I shielded my eyes to its implied perfection
An animal wading into the water, goodbye goodbye
You can’t see me waving but I am
Waving my handkerchief as the train picks up speed
Away, like the realization of becoming an anachronism
Like a light that no longer needs you to mother it
The necessity of motion
Relegated to renaissance with the clockmakers and the blacksmiths (and the playwrights, let’s not kid ourselves)
What a strange and perhaps alien ritual
To us with our light switches and instant gratifications
How futile it must have seemed
When someone invented a street lamp
That would stay alight,
All those hours, those nights and years
Following the mechanisms before they learned how to burn
And then to be simply
Wished away ,
Vanished into romance, which one supposes could be validating
The modern lights that come on automatically when you walk beneath them,
They mimic the pre-electric pattern, the ritual against night and chemical
And the circling and tender fuel-nurse
So it’s a good thing,
A kind thing
And a fortunate thing despite the way it makes me cough
That there’s a thousand more years worth of soot
Preserved for all of us
Little orphan clever
Flexible chimneysweeps
2nd Place
Sammy Nour – ‘The London Shake’
The provincial came on the train
To find his fortune
He came listening on his headphones
To his own beat
With his own rhythm locked into his dancing feet
He stands on the pavement
He feels like
A wasp in a beehive
He looks down
At his loose fitting jeans
Simple skate shoes
And relaxed manner
No uptight walk to fit into place
He feels like a tourist from outer space
He wonders if the people here really
Spend so much of their time underground
And why the pilots of this hub
Who carry the financial world
But work underground all day
Like blood diamond slaves
Are demonized by the media
For wanting a better wage
“Give them every penny they ask for”
A northerner says
It’s the rhythm of London, it’s the beat of London
We all dance to it, we have no choice
We often drive to it, or cycle to it
It’s not the kind of place that wants to hear your voice
A swirling vortex of people, thoughts, emotions
A super bee hive ever expanding
The queen bee ever demanding
You hear the rhythm of London, the beat of London
We all dance to it, we have no choice
If you can make it here you can make it anywhere
I guess its just making it that’s the problem
Here we need to insert a definition of made
I would say it’s fulfilling your potential
Whatever that is, whoever you are
No matter what the mediocre driven society
Or celebrity obsessed newspapers say
You feel the rhythm of London, the beat of London
We all dance to it, we have no choice
A summered five ringed frenzy engulfed us
The intensity, adulation
The lust for gold
And social admiration
Fear, hope, disappointment
Anger, envy and
Heartbreak for those who didn’t come top
The king a yellow flame
Who goes too fast to stop
Dance to the rhythm of London, the beat of London
You have to, you have no choice
The blue madness engulfed us in May
It couldn’t have come too soon
The blue hearts would say
I guess most never thought
They’d see the day
On an oligarch’s money
That kingdom was made
Or bought I should say
A modern society with modern bling
But still old empirical ways
Those who lap up success wont complain
Those who are jealous want to go back to the old days
It’s the rhythm of London, it’s the beat of London
We all dance to it, we have no choice
People talk a lot of economic depression
I rather think it’s a social recession
Material lust resulting in iphone obsession
Too many causes of which to give
Each one a mention
The collective conscious awaits in
A juvenile detention
Constantly looking at the phone or the floor
Looking up only enough to get through the tube door
A grave disconnection from the community
The personified London could improve itself
So much if only it had unity
The rhythm of London, the beat of London
As far as the eye can see, choice less dancers
Some perceived repressed people
Sit in an affluent café
Do you know what they talk about?
Do you know what they say?
They wonder when they’ll see the day
They get all of ‘their’ land back
Which they’ve never been to
And is thousands of miles away
Not far from that place
The diaspora stay
You know what they say?
You guessed it they
Wonder when they’ll get their land back
And why they had to move
Thousands of miles away
To the rhythm
To the beat
The provincial walks down the street
On a foggy London night
Not uptight, but upright
Has he made it?
Hard to say
But that rhythm of London still plays
It’s very own Harlem shake
It keeps us dancing
Tasking
Romancing
For you see it has to
It has no choice
1st Place
Megan Hollingsworth – ‘Blackjack’
The moment she claimed her soul
was the moment just before the ring came off his finger
was just before the moment the ring was placed
on the counter. With two cards spread the dealer sees the whole deck.
The only container sure enough to condemn a woman’s passion to servitude
is her own insecurity.
The only thing powerful enough to free a woman is her own will
to be seen, the strength of her will determined by a single degree
of desperation. The two are closest companions, as like the same
desperation and passion, derived from one another
a concoction leading her to this choice moment, to whom
will she sell her soul next?
She knows a woman’s erotic potential is valued above all else
her sex, even a hint, is an easy sell if she is willing.
The moment she becomes unwilling
is the moment she sets the forest ablaze, perplexed
by what has been destroyed to create her.
Was it the lightning
the fire or the sun that revealed so many faces of the predator, such deranged
images of herself?
Megan in her own words: “I am a mother, poet, dancer, and compassion activist. She is founder and creative director at ex·tinc·tion wit·ness, a collaborative art project that offering creative witness with groups being and becoming extinct. See www.extinctionwitness.org and www.meganhollingsworth.com“
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