Hello peoples. Just a little post to let you all know that I haven't forgotten about Verbophobia. I know, I know, it has been awhile. I've only received a couple of entries, however, so I'm hanging on in hopes of receiving a few more. So, one more week, and then I'll post. Hope Thanksgiving went well...

O, by the way: the poems I have received absolutely rock.

The new word list has arrived. Have fun.

protrusive, cotton, hush, rent, amnesia, self-hypnosis, deflect, determinacy, worn, throe, adhesion, lurid, sapper, leader, epigraph, strawberry.

Hello again blogland. A good round of poems. Call it fate, call it chance, but by the flip of a coin Jimmy Nickles has won the Dante's Ass Prize this week. Way to go, Jimmy. Thanks very much to all. A new word list will be up soon, so stay tuned.


THE COVE
of tranquility hewn
by Jimmy Nickles

There sprawls in the cove no impropriety,
only the earliest minutes of the evening.
All things lift to shoulder the easy yolk
of light, each green a pupil to its gold.

Withered at their salt-bitten tips, the oak
leaves make the rustle that made the Greeks
think they must be sacred to Zeus, who
spoke through their hen-speckled crumpling.

This tiny curve of reeds and saltwater,
like one small shoulder of the hydra-headed
sea, at dawn coos with heron prattle,
at dusk hoots with social birds unseen.

But as the sun stands now, or sinks, the brush
becomes all climbers, each vine poking
a nib like a spyglass to the beams,
pressure shooting up from underneath.

And stalking too from down below
the smarmy shadows grow as if from dirt,
Athenian shade, they loom from under
leaf, and gauge the light's retreat.

Yet nothing will unspool those ampersands
so slenderly curling the symbiotic stumps
and branches; sticklers for life, ticklers
that lick the ankles of this passerby.

Eke they do and strive, unlike me, mere
and complacent mortal here, who lets
all worries flee, and skips not skims
the asterisks for footnotes I ignore,
and just keep reading the cove itself , the core.

*

LOST AND FOUND
by Janice, Damsel In A Dress

Spyglass pressure:
The pupil cracked

Shattered.

Withered.

Crying on a smary social shoulder.
-
Impropriety prevails:
A child abandonded

Hen-speckled.

Tree-climber.
-
The dective's on the case.
His tickler reads:

Pick up & eat a gauge at lunch.

*

TWIST LIKE ME
by Michael T.

ah, your smarmy
fucking pupils
give away the

impropriety
of your withered
morals

but the pressure
of your
vulva
causes my tongue

to twist --

an ampersand,
a tickler,
a good vibration

that runs,
flees,
escapes

through your navel
through your ribs
through one shoulder
and out the next;

please, please,
remove this blasted
spyglass
from my hen-speckled ass

for you cannot possibly
guage
from such a viewpoint

how
such social climbers
as your sweet self

can twist like me.

*

NO AMPERSAND
by Giuseppe Agosta

Through the spyglass

a pupil fixed inexorably,

a perspective, a point of view

irrevocable: it's either or

there is no ampersand

between consciences

and willing or not you are subject

to a pressure from within

the pressure to look,

to exert your gaze.



The impropriety stated is simply

the will of your fellow neighbour,

learn to gauge pretension.

It's either or, there is no

ampersand, either you are or not.



The shoulder you maybe tempted

to use is death, a sign

of withered being,

don't be too social,

I have seen many

a climber fall

miserably,

mainly for their efforts

were not theirs,

the tickler is an excuse,

a path to follow to ignore yours

it's either or, there is no ampersand.



You may end up

growing twisted and weak

like a seed planted into soil

too dry, smarmy

and foreign to yourself

yet pleasing so many

amongst those

whose power you have accepted.

I see you sitting with a feeble

timid smile, full of shame,

hens-speckled facing

another Old Speckled Hen

and that's a possibility, because

it's either or, there is no ampersand.

*

"DEBT CONSOLIDATION"
by Michael Helsem

Heft a withered spyglass to my shoulder;
The hen-speckled view recedes.
A impropriety of bloggers
Couldn't ransom this antlion-funnel climber.

Only pupil of the razory tickler,
I pressure my ghosts to emit
Nouns that allow a smarmy ampersand:
It is social, like a pogrom of mirrors.

But flotsam alone will gauge
The throughput of the seeded storm.

*

Only a few days left to submit a poem. New stuff will be posted this coming Wednesday!