[Roger Slater]

Chris, that won't win, but if I had any British currency I would send you 25 pounds out of my own pocket -- plus an extra fiver.

[Max Goodman]

Hilarious, Chris!

("Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens)

I placed a war in Tennessee,
The Spanish Civil War,
A small mistake, it seemed to me.
We had one there in '63
(Or '84 or '70).
My teacher, she got sore.

Heck, what's the use of history
If nobody can disagree
With all them crummy powers-that-be?
Let's make our own minds up, be free!
I much prefer Democracy
To studying some more.

[Martin Parker]

Come jive with me and be my love
And, with a glitterball above,
Let’s join the dance-floor’s push and shove
To celebrate our Sixties love.

The jive of our frenetic youth
Is too demanding now. In truth
The jive may not be quite the dance
For pensioners who’d feed romance.

Our knees and backs won’t stand the strain
And violent movement causes pain.
Too soon we find a loss of puff’ll
Reduce us to a soft-shoe shuffle.

But, what the Hell! We’re still alive
And love’s still blind at sixty-five.
So, till we’re ninety or above,
Come jive with me -- but slowly, love.


Chris, I know a quarterly online light verse mag. which would welcome your Christmas epic. But I'm afraid I couldn't pay you for it !

[Roger Slater]

Sure you could pay him, Martin . . . with the money you get from winning this competition, which seems quite likely with your latest.

[Martin Parker]

Christina Rossetti -- Remember

Remember me when I am gone awry.
Or if, by then, you're just the same as I
At least please try.


There is a lot of really good stuff here and still two weeks to go for more masterpieces. With a normal maximum of six "winners" a lot of flowers seem destined to be "born to flush unseen." Lighten Up Online would welcome a selection of dejected losers in its June Issue -- stuff of this quality deserves the widest possible exposure, I reckon. Hats off to all of us, say I ! Let's blow some trumpets.

[RCL]

Not 138 but Johnson 328; Franklin 359

A Bard came down the Walk—
He did not know I heard—
He sang without the briefest pause
Just like a moonstruck bird.

And then he sipped a brew
That gave his sounds some sass,
And sauntered to a gathering group
Hankering for a Lass.

He blinked his restless eyes
And tried to find the best—
Eyes like raging rings of fire
That surveyed all the rest

And seemed to be Amused.
I asked how he was paid.
With that he smiled, invoked his Muse—
Who always got him laid.

Museless,
Ralph

[Jan D. Hodge]

My sandle burns at both ends,
The beach is hot as hell.
Someone wrote that in the Men's.
Too bad he couldn't spell.

[Jan D. Hodge]

Max: "The instructions could mean to keep changing a letter in each line, but that wouldn't be practical at all."

Not practical, perhaps, but not impossible.

Tichborne's (Other) Elegy

My crime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of boy is but a dish of pain,
My drop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my food is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no son,
And now I live, and now my life is gone.

My tale was heard and yet it was not sold,
My fruit is fallen and yet my heaves are green,
My mouth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not keen;
My thread is out and yet it is not spun,
And now I live and vow my life is done.

[John Whitworth]

Do you know, that's very good. I'm particularly taken by the second line.

[John Whitworth]

Do you know, that's very good. I'm particularly taken by the second line.

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and fart.
It was the cassoulet, but what the hell.
You have my verse, my honour and my heart.
And now, my sweet, you have my bum as well.