Each day I drive the Belt to work
with a million other slobs.
We pilot cars a decade old.
We're lucky, we have jobs.
Being stuck in traffic is no fun
so my eyes search for distraction.
Your bumper- stickered Civic
offers motorists didaction.
You've no shortage of opinions,
you're a child of hope and change.
gay women for abortion rights?
forgive me, that seems strange.
You're all for education ,
and it seems you're down on God
Your promotion of vasectomy
strikes me as rather odd.
We creep along at walking speed
in the misnamed morning rush
I smile at one old sign that reads:
"Lesbians against Bush"
I change lanes and creep up beside
this most amusing creature.
Shock and awe is what I felt-
She is our children's teacher!

Motions croak in crimped t-shirts
Peace hurts the leg of 3 wheelers
Spit in a book, carefully holding hands over healers
Frosted articulation of bricks hitting off buildings
The doctor resumes surgery on the filming
Actress gummy mouthed backpacker sharing rooms with a jet-lagger galvanizing goo
If I phone myself, I’ll phone you too
Ad-hoc hop around dentures holding saxophones, laziness is the common king around here
Match the sketch with the deliriant fear free freedom and sneer
Shut the promo drunk and dolo
Potions of pogos bouncing so low
Both bones focal, keeping in a smile from an eye perched over the edge spitting on the populous
Attacking formulas with cruel gruel from the oesophagus
Wilting oxalis wooded in obelisks
Mortal coil in amphetamine greed for the sleep
Positioned slightly awkward and barely out of reach
Been seen being dreams piercing holes in the purple of the seeds
Peace is deemed green, free me from the iron between the sheets
Coins flipped in a river and an etude rings out with a profound sense of urgency
Won't wake up faces blindly painted deranged by a 5 sided box that gave fame to what was contained
Warp the wattage, walk in nervous
Hold cosmic stardust in one hand
Another a phone to call the best man
To marry the two hands and I’m sure the priest will understand
Hairs on the ceiling float through the window and provide an outspoken account of how they are feeling
Canisters of friendship huffed in the backs of vans till passing point seizures explain themselves
9mm film reel candy bars and ring modulation skeletal structure cat gut harps
Never finish a walk to work without beginning the start
Trolleys of Dolly Parton facelifts
Knife cutter butterfly anaesthesia makeshift
Hollow bellies of pardoned mop heads becoming a commodity
I can't say sorry if I begin to speak so oddly
I’d say probably yes if you lit a fire beyond the fence where the old man gambles drop-***** with 50 pence
Bite down on copper, synchronise the action
Winter comes and goes like conversation going out of fashion
Morbid, terra-fin switches waterbeds
Hints home at spit-roasting ostrich heads
Cost and effect, cause and intellect
The castle puts his foot down only to find a horses neck
Zipped up in honey, the combs hive mind should reconsider its self lucky
Unorthodox autodidact naturally diffracting compound eye composes paranoia and lies
The patronage of the savant is murderous and contrived
Its better out than in
The constant metaphor for unluckiness
Is where we begin
Radiance in a hot water semi permeable membrane crescent
Strokes the backs of frogs in the desert, stars iridescent and sun bears a weapon
Hammocks, ****, sweat on the brow, split lips on cornerstones of the solstice in the dead of now
Space-age ape on the country road lets out a cough
Caution to the hissing hills ****** in hidden zygotic havens
Actors have no time to cut themselves shaving
Austro-Bavarian chemical burns Molotov cocktail sewers
Crayons let me draw this face on, paint the day on and on, it gets newer
Its the context at which you and I notice the separation, that cues canned humour

i have come to believe in an astral rain
void of pain, sand-washed and bathed in chain;
from woodlands birthed.
empty hollow and arrow pierced navel
sever nurturing swallow bond,
still as kundalini pond - forgotten is this soul's bold pyre.
for distant fire closer now than e'er
regret older than thought which never,
alive in silence came - bolder taught and brighter.
my autodidact spirit lost;
some western breadth now more to east no cost
no woman nor man or beast in ahimsa feast.

Selection Criteria

We seek a person showing an authentic engagement with the culture of language. The applicant needs a broad appreciation of linguistic form and an inclusive approach.

Essential:

• Two good honours degrees from a top performing university - Or relevant experience as an autodidact or dilitante.

• A willingness to appreciate and engage in other people's expression of poetic form.

• Openness to the ways in which language is multimodal and able to blur the distinction between word, voice, sound, body and image, whilst being able to draw upon the conventions of each mode.

Desirable:

• Colourful life-history, and a keen eye/ear for human and natural dynamics, and the capacity to dissolve the distinction.

Please submit sample below:

There was a tree. Indeed, there was a tree... that night we played with Gertrude or some girl or boy or some other echo or other.

Had she not mentioned the issue with the fragmentary interjections by candidates? The capacity of evocation is lost with this fashion for modernism [Golden light of blue buzzard and some such and wot not before azure cream in winter time and  crystalline glaze] and its reflexive interruptions. Perhaps she should start again. [Does it even need to be a word? And what is this anyway?]. Re: Start again - good lord we are forced to read some nonsense [in the steam rows and the bath cabin], often with a similar flow. What about the art of pleasing our palate? We bump our heads against the brackets, elliptical conjurings and compound punctuation: -

Oh! ... Out of time? Battery low? Well, this will have to be the submission then. Good luck.

A Poem For All The Publishers Who Say “No Poetry”

I’ve looked it up a million times –
(a little bit of overstatement never hurts)
I think in meter, think in rhyme.
It suits my temperament.  Reverts
To chimes of nursery rhymes
Instinctive in us all –
This call to childhood’s guiltlessness.
Yet publishers of good repute
Refute this claim
And to their shame,
Their snobbish, profiteering shame,
Say No to poetry.

We should attack!
Abundant in attractiveness are we.
Ever clever, disciplined;
Deep, reflecting all reality:
And yet they say, “NO POETRY,
DO NOT SEND POETRY”.
Refused, rejected
Are we bards dejected?
Never!
We go on forever,
Eager in our hunger.

While you publishers go under,
We are there, bad, corny, muted,
Understated and astut-ed;
Couplets, meters, forms abstract,
Highbrow, lowbrow, autodidact:
Rumbling on like thunder.

A Poem For All You Publishers Who Say “No Poetry” 12.21.2016
A Sense Of The Ridiculous II; Our Times, Our Culture II; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II;
Arlene Corwin

Will not donate
my bloodstained shirt.
It divides the cuffs.

The alphabet turns
around to watch the fall
of syntax.

Everynight I wait
for the moon to rise
from the crescent of golden eyes―

for another encounter
with a god, who
would not listen to soliloquy

of a rich begger―
sitting in the ruins of a temple,
he built of dreams.