[image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

[image by artist and photographer Nick Dormand]

A wait for the weight
of this long and heavy scare
in the dark of hope.

It is a huge weight
and the long scared wait in this,
hope never more dark.

It is the long wait
and the massive weight of this,
heavy on our hope.

Who would
have thought of them
as furniture assassins?

Mine here
at this desk has witnessed
so many findings.

Ergonomics
if you have the disposable
income:

we should be
kneeling, but our poor
are anyway.

Buttock-popliteal length
is no longer an apt measurement for
life expectancy.

In ten centuries
of change, comfy things for sitting
and lounging on

have facilitated an
advancement in the democracy
of indolence.

That old game of
explaining to an alien why
we invented the chair –

and them standing there,
a floating essence
in air.

If Commodity Culture
is a title for the next found prose poem,
will it be entirely ironic?

Allhallowtide’s ebb and
flow of candies and other
secular consumerism.

Obliged
to consider
purgatory.

How I smelt the discarded innards
of my neighbour’s pumpkin over yesterday’s
bifurcating fence.

Guising
sounds so
civilised.

Once upon a time,
white sheets were draped as ghosts
tricked along safer streets.

Pet dogs
too ugly to need
a disguise.

Stingy Jack,
the Devil and
turnip terrors.

That myth
of LSD in the
popcorn balls.

Background story here.

I rarely enter poetry competitions, and it is some years since I last won for a submission, but this genuinely took my interest, and I wrote the following specifically for the theme:

I was pleased to read this at a zoom presentation last Saturday, along with others and their shortlisted works [which included prose entries] and I was also pleased to be awarded third prize. My found prose poetry can be difficult enough to read on the page, but I think it will have been a tough ask just to hear it, and it was a challenge to read. It wasn’t by any means a test to enter a found prose poem, but I made no compromises to what I write for entering.

My thanks to all who organised and were involved, but especially the poetry judge Dorothy Lehane. I especially appreciate her thoughtful observations on my entry, as I am sure the other shortlisted writers and prize winners do for theirs. Details can be read here.