[Jayne Osborn]

This competition has been a truly remarkable one! It generated 257 posts on its original thread here, plus a record-breaking postbag of entries, and all 4 prize winners and 2 of the runners-up are Spherians.

Absolutely humungous congratulations to Martin Elster (I might have to bestow the nickname 'Batty' on you now, Martin, sorry ) and to Peter Goulding, Bazza, Graham King, Mary McLean and George Simmers. I'm in awe of all of you, and having said "The Oldie comp never uses titles for the winning poems" there are in fact two of them in this line-up!

(Next competition on a new thread)

Jayne

The Oldie Competition
by Tessa Castro

In competition no. 162, the annual bouts-rimés, you were asked to use the rhymes, as it happened, of Keats’s sonnet, 'After dark vapours'. Knowing it was Keats seemed no advantage, although I enjoyed Roger Wright’s conceit 'On Being Selected for the English Test Team'. Mary McLean’s narrator, Fanny, unkindly began: 'How should one kill a poet who complains / about his bloody cough all night and day?'
There were dozens of good 'uns among your entries, of which I’ve never seen so many.
J C M Hepple began energetically: 'I’d like to pluck a cactus from the plains / of Mexico, so if we meet one day / it can be spiky cudgels straight away.' George Simmers, by contrast, began gloomily, as he meant to go on: 'The chocolate biscuits gone, he eyes the plains / Despondently; must each Home Office day / Produce this sense of promise leached away?'
Alison Prince took the cue of the rhyming diphthongs to compose an elocution lesson. Brian Wells constructed an ingenious crossword poem beginning 'Spinal with crypytic confusion make plains', and yet it was not the most ingenious, as Graham King’s tortured fantasia (below) showed.
Commiserations to these, and congratulations to those below, each of whom wins £25, with the Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to the batty Martin Elster.

Microchiroptera

No microchiropteran ever complains
when the rawness of autumn creeps into the day,
his arthropod prey having fluttered away.
With his pals he piles into a cave, then abstains
from all food while he hangs like a fuzzball. The pains
he’s taken to gain a few grams in the May
of his bug-catching bustle will, hopefully, play
in his favor, reviving him after the rains
and the blizzards retreat. Then, with luck, when the leaves
begin to uncurl in the bright vernal suns,
diaphanous pinions unfurl, and the sheaves
of packed bodies disperse into twilight’s cool breath.
Moths and beetles, look out! For exuberance runs
intense in his blood as he seeks for your death.
Martin Elster

Red-light Roxanne dumps him. He is too creepy, she explains.
So Sting resolves to call her up a thousand times a day,
although he suspects he might be wishing his days away.
He can’t stand losing her, so he flies to the moon, tear stains
on his spacesuit. There, he breaks his legs, to add to his pains.
(Luckily he hasn’t copped she is really Brian May.)
Then he meets a legal alien and begins to play
Da Do Do Do for it but it shuffles away. Sting leaves
the moon, muttering some tat about invisible suns.
Back home, he is so lonely, so lonely that he stuffs sheaves
of messages inside bottles, watching every last breath
she takes, every move she makes, until finally she runs
dementedly from him, shrieking, 'Oh Sting, where is thy death?'
Peter Goulding

My wife’s a perfect devil. She complains
About my habits twenty times a day.
I try to please her but she moans away
About beer breath, soft porn, tobacco stains,
My stubbled chops… it gives me stomach pains.
I can’t do right for doing wrong. Last May
She dragged me out to see a boring play.
Guess what? It bores her too, and so she rains
A storm of blame on me. This standoff leaves
Only an outcome that would suit the Sun’s
Tabloid agenda, sell bloody crime in sheaves.
I’m old and fat and slow and short of breath,
But some degree of murder in me runs.
At night, in sleepless dreams, I plan her death.
Basil Ransome-Davies

Tomboy
I often play at hoopla. Ins
And outs and roundabouts, I gad, ay!
Sometimes falling, skinning my knees raw, ay,
While scanning some far vista… Ins
And outs, certainties, doubts. My Pa (ins
And outs of explanations) tells me what I am, ay,
With one deft letter questioning my hoopla: 'Y?'
But then relents; again I’m free to romp, hurra! Ins
And outs about the house; I climb, crawl eaves,
Get leaves and dirt inside my clothes: uns-
Peakable mess of dress! Pa reaches, heaves
Me down, his frown so sombre. At 'H'
Now my speech sticks, leaving things further uns-
Aid; inside, 'Hi, Help!' but, puffed out, I abide at 'H…'
Graham King