Light Bulb Festival Poetry Slam Competition

Dear all,

It is a great honour to win my first slam competition at the Light Bulb Festival of the Arts in Colchester today, particularly against such worthy acts. My thanks to all concerned, in particular Mr James Sarek of Colchester Poetry for organising the event. Here are the three poems I performed today in order of reading:

Social Elephantitis

Here I stand all club footed, deformed of thought

The elephant man, stunted pigmy man
Angry repressed, unspoken agenda boy
Twisted tree trunk human
Frustrated misshaped pretzel-person 
Want to say what I think chip removed
Defused, limp, flaccid, unexploded

 

All emotion safely shrink-wrapped

Like sausages in a butchers window
Nodding in the right places android
Trained not to rock the boat cadet
Reverse crashing kamikaze suicide
Socially acceptable taboo swallower
Mustn’t say that acceptance non-doer

Mustn’t complain about

The supremely underdone vegetables
The un-cleaned restaurant carpet
The dropped knife covered in human hair
The blackened pizza there
The cremated shoe leather steak
The hard-cold hot-soft chocolate brownie
The extortionate bill
The surly waiters
The un-flushed toilets
The flat, pump machine cola
The tips that go to the company
Awful re-heated mediocrity
 

Utterly, totally, repressed

Social Elephantitis sufferer
Smorgasbord of chemicals eater
It’ll go away if I ignore it believer
Cowardly, timid underachiever
Victorian table leg coverer
Inward facing instigator
Embryo in incubator
Socially engineered shrink-wrapped person
Glutinous deformed personality
Genetically engineered tomato eater

Don’t smoke live longer person

Don’t drink live longer person
Cut calories live longer person
Don’t have sex live longer person
It just bloody well seems like it sufferer
Thoughtless C of E box ticker
Baby’s mouth dummy sucker
Hunch-backed agreement mediator
Craven hollow ingratiatory

 

Plastic rubbish in the streets

Mac Donald’s never rotting feast
Sweatshop Addidas on the feet
Everything from China going cheap
Crazy person getting irater
I blame it all on the creator
Washed up choking oily birds
Gorilla hand ashtray displays
Cutting down the Amazon
No fall-back plan when it’s all gone
Man’s putrid arrogance
While I sit on the fence

Primordial dwarf, pusillanimous

Not wishing to cause offence

Sweet Nothings

Least said soonest mended

So I said nothing
Never dared to utter
My unfathomable love

Mustn’t cause offence

So I said nothing
Never ran the risk
Of saying how I felt

Mustn’t rock the boat

So I said nothing
Even as I bled
From your neglect

Better to keep quiet

So I said nothing
Swallowed the pain
Of losing you for good

Grown men don’t cry

So I said nothing
Lest a tremor in my voice
Should give the game away

All the times I said nothing

Lie stacked like corpses
Fading in my memory

All the times I said nothing

Lie within like tinder

Waiting for a match

 

All the times I said nothing

Beating their balled fists

On the fortress of my chest

All the times I said nothing

Acting a non-speaking part

Unbearably repressed

Least said longest broken

I should have swallowed pride

Better to have loved and lost

Than never even tried

 

Hitting the glass

When reality stubbornly refuses to fall in line with projection

Filled with joy, the cardinal bird has seen his true love’s reflection

Seen her face with those little summer freckles on her nose

Like the sweet skin of a deliciously ripe banana!

Love fills his heart and he longs to soar into the sky

To proclaim at the top of his lungs this love, this longing!

 

It’s the same every time he sees his mate

He never tires of studying her

He thirstily drinks her every detail

Cool green eyes, like a jade rock-pool

 

Unable to bear her cathartic beauty a moment longer

He beats his wings and rides the length of the nearest sunbeam

Her sweet smell intoxicates his nostrils, floods his senses

Her smile triggers sparks of iridescent excitement

Flashing through his innards like a bolt of lightning

Leaving glowing patterns in his eyes as if he’d stared at the sun…..

 

All sense is lost, all rationality subsumed in the joy of the moment

He sings his song, a melody of love spun silk

He longs to clothe her in devotion

Sip sweet honey from her navel

Spend all eternity wrapped in her charms

But there’s always the pane of glass between them

He cannot reach her…..

 

 

Mark Harris has asserted his right under

Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

To be identified as the author of this work.