[Christopher ONeill]

I'm really only using the excuse of this competition to vent a poem I've wanted to write for years, but worried was too spiteful and petty to spend time on now that I am a grown up.

This is probably only because I am a very trivial person:

F.Q.

Being ye Fyrst
VI Bookes of Edmvnd Spenser hys Faerie Queene
faythfuly redused into foure verses.

Assorted thugges kitte up in suitts of tinne;
wayge lothesome Warre on Terrour through ye wood;
Raype, murther, waterborde foule Sarrasins.
(They're 'oure sonnes ...' so I gesse it's al goode).

[Marion Shore]

Once upon a midnight dreary
I had a visitor, dark and eerie,
a bird who, to my every query,
only croaked out: "Nevermore."

[Roger Slater]

Resume
(Parker)

Razors and poisons
and gas are unpleasant.
You might as well live,
at least for the present.

[John Whitworth]

I was trying that one, Marion. I'm still cogitating.

[Lance Levens]

The antique traveller's fit to be tied.
"Don't ever, ever, trust a guide.
Stuck in the desert, seering air,
And he starts mewing: '" Despair! Despair!"'

[Marion Shore]

When I was one-and-twenty,
A wise man's words seemed trite;
But now I'm two-and-twenty,
And damn it! He was right!

[Susan McLean]

A loaf of wine,
a jug of bread—
that’s all you need,
as Omar said.

Susan

[Marion Shore]

Abandon all hope
and yada yada...
from Hell up to Heaven,
the whole enchilada.


ooooh. sorry

[John Whitworth]

The Raven

Once I knew a doomy raven, left me red-eyed and unshaven.
On my heart its cries are graven, crying for the lost Lenore,
My poor baby, dead as mutton. How that bird was on the button.
Nevermore, oh nevermore.

[Martin Parker]

Surely we must have some winners in all this lot.
Here is, perhaps, the longest item to be covered to date.

Assorted wordy pilgrims on a trip
share many a long and weirdly ill-spelt quip
some of which had been much better kept
less bawdy, or as "Canterbury Smut" yclept.