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Unread 04-02-2014, 04:53 PM
Jayne Osborn's Avatar
Jayne Osborn Jayne Osborn is offline
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Default The Oldie "Suspense" Comp results

...The suspense is over -- here are the results.
Wins for Bazza (aka G M Davis - I keep forgetting, so thanks for the reminder, Chris!), Chris and new member Alison this month, and an HM for Graham. Congratulations, all of you!

(Next comp on new thread)

Jayne


xxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Oldie Competition
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxby Tessa Castro

In Competition No 174 you were invited to write a poem called ‘Suspense’.
I’d been watching Breaking Bad, and have now consumed all 62 episodes, so my disbelief has been well and truly hanged, drawn and quartered.
Hitchcock, whom I’d mentioned, was a more frequent subject of your entries, but Peter Davies’s narrator saw himself as a nine-year-old, fearfully evading the farewell kiss of his Aunty Maud. Dorothy Pope wrote about the suspenders below a girl’s first liberty bodice. Graham King had trouble keeping up his narrator’s trousers.
Katie Mallett found suspense in Pride and Prejudice, Howard Emes in the ‘gong’ game in Double Your Money. Max Ross, of course, could hardly wait to see if his entry had won, grabbing The Oldie from the doormat: ‘I tell myself it’s just a harmless game / As I rip the wrappings off to seek my ...’
So, without further delay, commiserations to them and congratulations to
those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of a suspense-filled Chambers Biographical Dictionary going to... G M Davis.

The man stands on an upper balcony.
Is it his day to die? He doesn’t know.
He’s shouting words that plummet vacantly.
An audience assembles for the show.

The media are here before the cops
Or fire brigade. This is their daily meat,
The dream event of news crews and red-tops,
The mundane melodrama of the street.

The loud, devouring crowd are shouting back,
Hotly demanding what they fantasise.
This is the thrill of watching someone crack,
A morbid feast for voyeuristic eyes.

When firefighters and police answer the call
They hush the mob. He jumps belatedly.
Jump cushions break the suspense and his fall.
I shut the blind, go back to the TV.
G M Davis

I ask that you suspend all disbelief
As I reveal the form of my affliction:
Its long name’s metaphormosis – in brief,
I’m hooked on turning trite tropes into fiction.
I hear Hang on! and feel that I should cling,
Wings folded, to a beam in some dark place.
They hung upon his words: I see them swing
Beneath speech bubbles heading into space.
Hung parliament evokes hon. members strung
On lines like flapping laundry out to dry.
Hang fire will conjure lanterns lit and hung
To set soft radiance against night sky.
Hang-ups, hang-outs, hangdog and hanging tough –
What isn’t held forever in suspense?
Oh, hang it all, I say, enough’s enough,
I need psychiatry – and hang the expense!
Bill Webster

She’s thirty years my junior. I
Told her I think she’s hot.
For me now, the suspense is huge.
My friends tell me it’s not.

While I assume she’s weighing up
Pros (many) and cons (few)
Before deciding whether I’m
The guy she wants to do,

Naysayers let me know they think
I haven’t got a chance
Of getting my antiquity
Into her youthful pants.

For them, there’s no suspense at all.
For me, there’s quite a lot.
She’s thirty years my junior. I
Told her I think she’s hot.
Chris O’Carroll

Time hangs heavy in the short, dark days
when light is hardly hauled above the hill
before the thread slacks off and lets it fall
weightlessly back, a finished-with ball
returned to some soft locker, dark and dull
as worn-out navy gym knickers. The craze
of rising sap and love has dropped away
round the globe to a new-favoured place,
tight-threaded above eucalyptus trees,
dry creeks and sparse cattle. No pre-dawn call
there to start splitting heavy black skies
with lurid, sudden orange to amaze
sleep-drugged humans. But look… a herring gull
opens wide wings without knowing the ways
of time. It floats securely in the lazy pull
of ancient mystery and its own skill.
Alison Prince
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