FOP #4

9.4 Mention homelessness or poverty

Please buy my big issue mag
to you its a magazine
of celebs who gave up their time
to me its the first rung
on the ladder that leads
to a home
the chance to live normally
to start again
please spare two pound
give me life back again

9.5 Must include at least one rhyme

We are a nation hooked to our phone
the buried heads are eroding our home
we no longer chat, share small talk
staring at facebook even while we walk
maybe we need to stop this fascination
before we become a zombie nation.

9.6 Sad

She only wanted to play
outside with her friends
wearing her blue dress
again...

but now she is just
a trophy to be held aloft
just a shame for mankind
they cut her head off.

9.7 piece of furniture

That table is more
than a place to eat
it hosts debates
a place to explore
what happened in
each and everyone's
day.

9.8 About this site

As the last person logged out
this site sat all alone
everybody moaning
that this site is crap
on their phone
Baby rainbow dragged
the members by their scruff
and told us all
you haven't written enough.

10.1 freestyle plus form

Cannot be bothered to cook a meal
scour the cupboards for something quick
must be ready in minutes, instant grub
don't have the time for a saucepan to steal

and so...

a pot of noodles
only one atom away
from eating cardboard

10.2 stationery
the paper clip
not only a great paper holder
it will also, when bent
unlock your diary

10.3 crime prison or both

behind bars I have time to ponder
to read a book or learn a new skill
limited to free time, no freedom to wander
maybe it was wrong, to threaten to kill
crime doesn't pay when you are caught
in future I will stop, and give it some thought.

10.4 Mention homelessness, or poverty.

You never told her
how many times
you've tied a stone
around your belly
as a child, to hold
hunger away.

Now, you just bind one
around your heart.

10.5 Must include at least one rhyme.

This morning, I spread you
like butter on toast
and called you
my breakfast.

Tomorrow, you'll be
but a ghost,
filmy and
bypassed.

10.6 Category : sad

I've written to you for 79 days
like a historian, feelings chronicled;
spread and dated, as if their names or
order meant anything

or led to you at the end
of some ink riddled page,

but neither history nor writing
hold roads I've learnt,
just another form
of death,

just another form of death
on a page.

10.7 Include a piece of furniture

My dad always said
I'm way too young
to curl up in a rocking chair
with a shawl around my shoulders,
a steaming cup in my hands,
and wait

for winter.

10.8 Write a poem about this site!!

If PnQ was a country
I would be a silver haired,
mean old lady of 8 years and
probably sent to exile
three years ago.

1. Formed poem - but must be placed inside a free style poem. So write a normal poem, but add in a form somewhere throughout the poem.

The stagnant atlas I
Poured myself onto crispened
In the sundown-sepia pit.

All I wanted was to roam
In fields, bogs,
Rainforests, sail
The glacial oceans.

I can't undo the lines of geometry
Painted by previous incarnations of me
Upon this Earth. I can't be the Gaia
of this gradient-muscled eggshell.

11.2 Include an item of stationery, pencil, paper etc.

How ironic that I print my
Environtmentalism dissertation
As an epitaph, on the paper
Product of vanishing Amazonia.

11.3 Include a crime, or mention prison, or both!

I can't go to prison for my crime.
I didn't steal a car or hijack an ambulance.
I didn't hit anybody across the head or
Doctor my tax accounts. I didn't sell
Illegal goods or buy illegal services.
My crime was that I didn't do anything.

11.4 Mention homelessness, or poverty.

The sound of two pennies scraping together
Is not as comforting as people who are used
To the near-silent swish of paper think.

11.5 Must include at least one rhyme.

I am keeping this poem simple.
A cat jumped on the mat thinking
He had seen a rat. And who is to say
That my poem is any less true than
Anybody elses.

11.6 Category : sad

His autograph on the bottom of divorce papers
Was the last thing the children wanted. Seeing
Their Dad with some hot new Hollywood thing,
Or being introduced to Michael Fassbender
As their Mom's date on a magazine cover was not
The news they wanted to read about.
The flash of paparazzi cameras following them
To school was more taxing than anybody else
Could understand.

11.7 Include a piece of furniture

Why can't my wardrobe swallow me up
And spit me out in a snowy, fawn-populated
Land far away from here.

11.8 8. Write a poem about this site!!

In 6 years this site hasn't changed
as much as the poet who writes
on it, visits it like a second home,
a poetic retreat.

12.1

1. formed poem - but must be placed inside a free style poem. So write a normal poem, but add in a form somewhere throughout the poem.

My poems have freed themselves
of any style or substance, polished as
blindfolded scribbling or drunken elocution.

I hope that my words
won't be infected with this
chaos in future.

I hope the cost won't prove
too great.

12.2 include an item of stationery, pencil, paper etc.

I'm tempted to copy and paste
each poem I've written for the contest
and print them out on sheets of paper,
stack them up and build a paper city
with their flimsiness, recycle them before
testing out these new box of matches.

12.3 Include a crime, or mention prison, or both!

I stood in the claustrophobic cell
on Robben Island: Spartan and historic,
where an echo of Invictus seemed to linger
on the stale air. The only view
was of the prison yard, disused now,
disused but not forgotten.

12.4 Mention homelessness, or poverty.

Words won't fill a plate.
Rhymes won't paint the walls.
Rhythms won't buy school uniforms and
metaphors won't make the lumpy bed
any more comfortable or warm.
Letters strung together on a website can't
change anything.

12.5 Must include at least one rhyme.

Hope wasn't something I looked for,
not something I set out to find,
but I learned that without it
I was wandering blind -
I don't know what my future holds,
can't tell the good and bad,
all I know is every day I wake
in the morning, I'm glad.

12.6 Category : sad

I thought you were the best thing
that had happened to me. You tricked
yourself into my dreams of the future
when I dared dream them. You wrote
yourself into my story and I never saw
the delete button you carried around
with you, keeping it all to yourself.

12.7 include a piece of furniture

My desk is an uncategorised litany
of paper weights, timetable scrunchings,
scattered ink spills and tea coasters.
It is a three-dimensional representation
of the spottiness of my hitch-hiking mind.

12.8 write a poem about this site!!

The servers hum under the strain
of last minute scramblings of sleep-deprived
poets, looking to speed-write their way
back to normality

13.1 freestle + form

She
stumbles
sadly, eyes
like wishing-wells,
dried up due to the hands of misfortune.

A coin burns in her pocket,
its shape branding against
the soaked fabric, remindful
of days at the factory,
placing ribbons around fancy boxes,
as her loan wasn't even enough
to buy herself a lunchbox.

13.2 stationery

Tonight, as her face is candle-lit,
her quill betrays her, like her father,
like her lover - telling her
to be silent, silent and stationary,
forever standing still in sorrow,
whilst even the wax seems to move on.

13.3 crime or prison

Crimson stains her 1-dollar-shirt
(the one she stole from the market).

She will be persecuted, for
burying the family treasure
deep inside her chest,

dagger dripping with
the loss of hope.

13.4 homelessness or poverty

Beneath the viaduct, the shadows
of beer bottles add up to graffiti,
flickers like performance art.

It's the only place he calls home -
abandoned his office job
to roam freely in sorrow.

13.5 rhyme

The car's marred her far-reaching smile
for more than twenty years, and tears
shall nevermore flow freely, always stopping
at the craters beneath her eyes, collecting
the skies in the disguise that's her make-up.

13..6 sad

He's zipped up your ribcage and swore
never to touch it again -

you left your heartbeat on shuffle,
not knowing what song would describe you.

He dances on the dunes of drunkenness
whilst screaming your name -

you cover your ears from the voices
inside of your head ...

and the two of you fit
like shards from the same bottle,

but trash will be trash,
and glass will still scar.

13.7 furniture

You stranded on your bed
like a whale washes ashore,
stinking of seasalt and sweat
as your closet stared, mouth
wide open, as if trying to tell you
to exchange your swimsuit
for something less sticky.

13.8 pnq

This site, has been a burial place
for broken bones and bottled letters,
one carved, the other scarred,
as if waiting for that same promise
to be visited again
in bittersweet ambience.

14.1 freestle + form

She sits with one leg
atop a knee, laid-back like
the junky next door,

inhales the smoke
that litters from her poetry,
letter by letter, and
... exhales,
fulfilling her duty
as a good citizen,
a one-minute conversation
with the busdriver.

14.2 stationery

I wish to kiss as close
as pencil on paper, such intimacy
from lolling in each other's ink,
smudging cheeks a slick love poem,
and it's all your fault -
for writing me letters that kick open
the gates of my imagination, with leatherboots
and sunglasses on, sweeping me away
on a motorcycle romance.

14.3 crime or prison

My hands melt to bars
and stink of urine from the lack of soap
and my hair's been embroidered between
my fingers, because last night I fought
with the top of my head, screamed
at the way it smashed hearts
against the door and made cuffs
out of guilt, encircling me
in two, three, no, nineteen
years in prison.