Mash-Ups: post your entry before 14-Mar-08, Winner receives Simon Barraclough's book

Marrying Exposure
By Pam Heaney

It is December in Wicklow:
And here's the reason why;
So I can push you out of bed
Inheriting the last light,

When the baby starts to cry,
A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
I hand you the torch you see,

And you investigate
Those million tons of light
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
You may not apprehend it,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
But when the tumble-drier goes
It's you that has to mend it,

How did I end up like this?
You have to face the neighbour
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling

Should our labrador attack him,
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
And if a drunkard fondles me
As I sit weighing and weighing

My responsible tristia
It's you that has to whack him.
Yes, I'll marry you,
For what? For the ear? For the people?

You're virile and you're lean,
For what is said behind-backs?
My house is like a pigsty
Its low conductive voices

Mutter about let-downs and erosions
You can help to keep it clean.
That sexy little dinner
Taking protective colouring

Which you served by candlelight,
From bole and bark, feeling
As I do chipolatas,
For their meagre heat, have missed

The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
You can cook it every night!
It's you who has to work the drill
And yet each drop recalls

when I've got PMT it's you who gets the flak,
Who, blowing up these sparks
see great advantages,
But none of them for you,

And so before you see the light,
The comet's pulsing rose.
Imagining a hero,
I do, I do, I do!

Bugger the couriers
by Sylvia Paterson

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
I look down as the face below
goes sliding underwater.
It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
I stay a while to mine the earth
for what was lost at sea.
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

And she is miles from me
at around four months or so,
as if the faces of the drowned
might turn up in the harrow.

All to itself on the top of each;
frost on a leaf, the immaculate
lies. Lies and a grief
of nine black Alps.

And plough the lonely furrow,
a ring of gold with the sun in it.
Cauldron, talking and crackling
– the time is getting shorter –

and though I know it’s over with,
a disturbance in mirrors,
the sea shattering its grey one –
hold me when I hold you down:

love, love, my season.

The African Fort
by Joseph Sheers

Its only defences now, a ring of gorse,
cat snake in strange fruit tangling the land with vine,
its lights diminished like clothes sewn onto the body.

Beyond, the mossy gums
and their barrackyard laughter;
Augustus, chasing gateways that open to the view
and a stone pile.

High pitched calypso exfoliates
my horse, grinning still

when she touched him

nostrils full of sip bush rum.

Is so one day he go build one shack,
something huge enough to blame.

She wrings her hands
against the wind’s shoulder,
his sawdust jaw stitched like river silver

so I think I understand

I found
I glimpse
I disheveled
I listen
I still
I would’ve been
“I’m bleeding all over.”

*

The land is three-sixty,
splits the sky in two,
and up this hill is a lagoon,
the hail’s pepper shot,
a Methodist spire
and the man who lost his son.

Some Person
by Simon Ashbery

These are amazing: each
a library card on its date of expiry
joining a neighbor, as though speech

were a postcard stamped,
unwritten, but franked,
arranging by chance

to meet as far this morning
from March twenty-fourth to the first of April.
Suddenly what the trees try

to tell us we are:
a brace of keys for a mortise lock,
an analogue watch, self winding, stopped;

their merely being there
means a final demand
we may touch, love, explain:

a rolled up note of explanation,
a silence already filled with noises;
but beheaded, in his fist

a shopping list,
a canvas on which emerges
no gold or silver,

but a chorus of smiles, a winter morning
crowning one finger
placed in a puzzling light.

Our days put on a ring
of white unweathered skin.
Such reticence was everything.

Alan wins!

(I wuz robbed!)

Alan, send me your address, and I'll whiz out Los Alamos Mon Amour, written by Seemon BaRRaClOW (what is it with names on this board?)

Sorry, utterly dreadful of me, all things considered, but I FORGOT to vote!

Wouldn't have made a difference though, as I voted for Alan anyway.

Congrats, Alan! Got the new issue of the 'Nail' today - the standard of poems is rising there all the time, I notice! Now I wonder why that is?

Congratulations Alan. The best man won.

Yes, I agree! I just met Alan today at StAnza. I doubt he knows he's won this yet.

Gosh - I don't know what to say... I'd just like to thank a few people without whom this poem would not have been possible...

It's a mystery Jane, it really is. And I'm sure the fact that I personally firebombed the house of every "poet" in a fifty-mile radius unable to count five stresses in a line has nothing to do with it...