Competition: Misprint

Lucy Vickery presents this week’s competition

In Competition No. 2687 you were invited to take a well-known poem, change one letter in the first line and continue the poem for up to a further 15 lines.

Oh, for more space to do justice to a truly stellar postbag! It was agony whittling the entry down to just six. Deserving of a standing ovation at the very least are Robert Schechter, Gillian Ewing, John Whitworth, Iain Crawford, Chris O’Carroll, George Simmers, David Silverman and Martin Parker. The winners get £25 each, except Basil Ransome-Davies, who gets £30.

She lied in the upstairs bedroom
till she thought her tongue would bleed;
he was halfway wise, but he bought her lies
with the currency of need.

Desire she knew as a compound
of sullen nocturnal bars
and the shabby hells of cheap motels
and the smell of strangers’ cars.

They dwelt in a smoky silence
while the sweat cooled on their flesh
until hands and lips and grinding hips
conspired to lie afresh.

Most popular

Jawad Iqbal

Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism

But why scorn the emotional rescue
of a cynical caress
on the purblind date that can palliate
the Moloch of loneliness?
Basil Ransome-Davies

I met a traveller from an antique band
who said, ‘I’m—aarrgghh—Keef Richards,
Rolling Stone,’
and near this wraithlike geezer, on the sand,
half-sunk, a massive visage lay, with frown,
familiar lip, and leer of cold command.
‘Oh, him, the monument,’ exclaimed the codger,
‘I wrote a book and said he was my mate,
and told the world he had a tiny todger
and how I boffed his chick. He’s in a tiff,
that’s all—I mean, it’s Life, at any rate.’
And then he played the most stupendous riff,
and I forgot to ask him why he’d stayed
or driven others from this petroglyph.
I knew he’d lived so long within its shade.
Frank Osen