Spectator Competition: Whose legs?

In Comp. 3377 you were invited to write a version of ‘Ozymandias’ for the future. (The original, which obviously is for all time, arose from a contest between Shelley and Horace Smith to write a poem with that title.) The idea was to elicit responses to the US election, and the President-elect does feature heavily, but a desert of oblivion interrupted only by stone Trumps seemed too unremitting. The mood could be downbeat, so for some light relief here’s a snatch of Janine Beacham’s entry:

‘My name is Kardashian, Queen of Bling:
Look on my bod, yearn for my derriere!’
No followers remain. No downloads play,
Despite research, high tech, we’ve not one prayer
Of knowing what this colossus had to say.

Also deserving of a mention, among others: Alex Steelsmith, Sylvia Fairley, Mark Brown, Bob Newman, Mike Morrison, Hamish Wilson, D.A. Prince. The winners receive £25.

On a virtual tour of the dead zone
I connected with a user who said
He’d seen the ancient carved artefact known
As The Orange Face, portal that once led
To a primitive database, here weathered away.
A pedestal stood nearby, an antique glyph
Engraved thereon, in order to convey
Perhaps what the sculptor had not made clear,
The authenticity of that famed quiff –
‘Look here you jerks, it really was my hair.’
But that bouffant that has passed into myth
Had eroded away, not a strand there,
Just an empty mask on a monolith.

Sue Pickard

I met a reveller from an eastern land
Who said – ‘A really very swollen head
Rests on the shifting underwater sand,
Through the lips of which, upon the ocean bed,
Irradiated fishlings pass. Unmanned,
The plastic hair yet shaved upon each side,
The parting fixed, the eyeballs both obese,
He seems to greet the sea with useless pride:
I signed the pact that kept the world at peace.|
These words, unheard, are carved upon a void.
Respected Comrade! Leader still Supreme!
Your dumpy body’s blown to smithereens,
Washed by a blowsy tide in constant gloom –
Who knows what KIM is, what it really means?’

Bill Greenwell