The majority of those longlisted for the 2011 Christopher Tower Poetry competition have given their permission to publish their poems which are reproduced here in alphabetical order.

Isra Abdi
Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College, Birmingham
A place beyond the eye

I come to this place when I feel happy and sad and mad
But I come to this place to think, to be told, to say
My place is the best place I can think of.

I can disagree with rooms and people and sometimes books
But my place is always perfect for me
I have a bedroom that listens when I need to speak, but it never speaks when I need to hear
I have people that saywhen they want me to hear, but never hear when I want to say
But my place isn’t just a hearing place or just a speaking place
No, my place hears when I need to speak and speaks when I need to hear
© Isra Abdi

Nicki Biggs
South Wilts Grammar School, Wiltshire
Yellow.

Yellow.
We splash the paint around,
Neutral: gender neutral.
Each stroke covers a peeling border or
A telling scuff mark
Holding memories from years and years ago
And promising more and more to come.
Sunlight tiptoes in through the plain unfrosted glass
In its plain unpainted frame
And I laugh.
It pokes a pudgy finger at the carpetless floor,
The unassembled baby’s crib, the chair with the leg tacked on
But it has no effect. Certainly
The world appears a little brighter, the house a little softer,
Less dilapidated. But
The floor is still dusty, my mind is still dreaming, the
Walls are still yellow.
Later, much later, as I pace the floor
With its ageing carpet of creamy grey
And watch the rain through the plain splattered glass
In its plain painted frame,
I think back to another day,
When you and I would smile and laugh and watch the world
From our front-row seats. Before
You left me to explore new shores alone.
Another place, another time
With all the others who’ve accidentally left behind the ones they love.
But the world’s a little darker, our old home creaks around me, I
See the marks on the skirting board
From switching our baby’s crib to a child’s bed to a study
That we’ll pass our years away from. But
The floor is still dusty, my mind is still dreaming, the
Walls are still yellow.
© Nicki Biggs

Keturah Civelek

James Allen’s Girls’ School, London 

Nightwondering

 The raindrops burrow into my
window, hitting the glass with
a pellet-bright thwacking,
flickering shadows across my skin.
Lying on my back, hands, fold
over fold behind my head,
I ponder:
do you lie thus,
wondering into the night,
mind whirring, eyes
glimmering ochre light?

No,
sense tells me you are
most likely asleep,
fringe askew,
papery lids, a hand
flung upwards perhaps,
or dangling over the bed-edge
perhaps,
or curled by your collarbone,
thumb resting in that nook;

and with the same tapping of
watery fingers echoing from above,
beating out the moments,
trickling rivulets across your face,
and matching the flutters of your breast.
© Keturah Civelek

Elizabeth Crowdy
Gillotts School, Oxfordshire
Simplicity

Our home sang simple:

Floorboards trodden into wooden scoliosis;
that mirrored fractured curtain rails.
Sodden glove on the pavement outside.

A word that didn’t translate into the subtitles.

Fingers tracing ink-reminders on paper,
advised to its unusual architecture by
spilt water.

A love-forgot book
found

years later.
Brown crusts in the bread bin for
(still) unlucky ducks.
Shoelaces. Patience.

The sounds of our home:
Harmony caught in dust-corners.
(the continuous stream in your head of all the best washing up songs)

Maybe I notice too much.
Wishing for nothing but you;

Pouring water for tea
into the sun-cracked teapot we have known
Since childhood.
© Elizabeth Crowdy

Hester Dart
Pimlico Academy, London
Egg

Once it was a bird that flapped
Flapped in my lungs and squawked in my brain until I silenced it,
Calmed it so that it curled small
And made a shell to hide in.
For years it grew inside me, I felt it heavy in my womb, ticking
Its ticking heartbeat like the
Egg timer that sits on the kitchen shelf
And clicks,
Clicks in the empty air until with a buzz
It calls ‘time’s up!’ and
Wrenches the egg from me.
It flowed from me in a reverie
Without pain. And I
Collected it, as I collect blood
In an egg cup.
For a day it sat there, ticking
And I was mesmerized by its simplicity.
Its fragile shell coloured from my skin,
No longer a bird but filled with a deep yellow
Yolk and sticky, translucent fluid.
The yolk would be whole and round,
Ticking with my own rhythmic heartbeat.
Plump and unblemished from the years that I fed it.
I could swallow it and we would
Join together again and fly away
As birds do.
But the egg fits perfectly in my
Palm.  In the hollow between muscles.
I could crush it now, close my fingers and
Break its thin shell into jigsaw pieces,
Releasing its sticky contents. The yolk
Would break, marble itself into the fluid
Running down my wrist. Perhaps it would cook white
On my hot skin.
The egg remains intact for now,
The beauty of it keeps my fingers
Still.
© Hester Dart

Alishba Emanuel
The Holy Family Technical College, London

Just look up and examine the
Burning blue battlefield,
That was the sky
Being sprayed with
Animated nimbus clouds.
Quick, easy and simple
Touch the breath of the sun
And playing with the simplicity
Of execution using a noose
And the prosaic glass
Becoming beautiful as the
Clear glass crashes too.
It took a minute
For the veins in the green of his eye to turn red
And for him to shatter like sugar glass
© Alishba Emanuel


Rachel Finn
Peter Symonds College, Hampshire
In Heaven, we’ll kiss the feet of the famous

Before
Crowded, two, together around a stain on the carpet, the spill,
Trying to decide how to solve the world,

1)    So if nothing’s changed, why am I not the same?
2)    Whisked and weighed clouds. Foam. You stare and breathe snakes.
       I smile and spit broken stars.

After
Knives in spines and forced expression, grit, bear;
We are only ghosts pressing ears to the doors of other worlds,
1)    Prospects, possibilities, building future skeletons.
2)    Never tentatively even try.  Look.  Arch a foot over a cliff in darkness.
       Try to find simplicity.
© Rachel Finn

Calder Gillie
Camden School for Girls, London
Icarus and the Angel

1

Icarus flew too near the sun.
so his wings melted
and then he died by falling.

It would be a better way to die
by falling
with the world beneath you.

everyone else seems to just wait
for death
sitting on chairs
and staring at the celing in the middle of the night

flying up that high
would be a better way to die.

2

I used to drive past the
Angel of the North
on my way
to see Grandpa in North Shields

I remember the Angel
I don’t remember
being surprised by seeing it
as if it’s been there forever

but I didn’t
know then
that it was
a comment on post-industrial Britain or that it looked like Icarus might have

maybe because it’s not and it doesn’t
but it is and it does

it was a, big, red, man
with rectangles for arms
on a hill
But it’s not anymore.

imagine him jumping off of
the side of Britain or the world

flying high
to die
and landing where he did

my awe, of before
and, my now

3

maybe
I was wrong
to pretend I knew
when he died too
he died
he died like the people
in bed.

we mostly dream
and mostly die
to simply say maybe
© Calder Gillie

Natasha Harris
Peterborough School, Cambridgeshire
Re-Colour

A copy of you
Spends her days in the attic,
Seeing the world
Through the sepia eyes
And the brown tinted lenses
Of a throw-away charity box.

Much too young to be captured
Without film or a digital flash,
I doubt you heard of Polaroids
Or pitch black rooms
With silver trays and crimson lights.

Yet every one of your pictures
Is a tribute to colourless days,
To a time when the camera
Was of the opinion that skies
Can’t be painted blue.

Simplicity is black and white –
I heard you once confess...
It’s how our lives would truly look
Without the tasteless shades
That we insist on colouring
The world around us.

You must be able to recall
Each hue of glowing light,
Of every single dying Sun
That ever kissed the Earth,
Until you learn to find me
Although I’m no longer there.

When looking back in time,
I can admit
I feared the monochrome...
Some nights I dreamt of waking up
And failing to believe
You had the brightest golden hair
And perfect ruby lips.

Now as I look for you in photos
That are brown and torn apart,
I ask a simple question
About the achromatic art:
Who is to blame for my forgetting
The colour of your eyes?
© Natasha Harris

Laura Hill
Hertswood School, Hertfordshire
Simple World

There is a time of day,
Just before it becomes too bright,
When the world is decorated more simply;
A time when there are no flashing lights,
Where neither the sun or the moon share in the same delight,
Where the world is its own
And belongs to no woman and no man, child or infant
There are no whispers or screams to contend with.
Where silence is a foe but quiet, quiet is a trusted friend
And movement is infrequent,
Just the occasional car passing by in your preverbal vision,
And the world may be scattered with grey
But it is perfection in its own certain, simple way
Before chaos and colour have a chance to tamper with it.
This is the time of day I admire most,
Walking down an empty street
Left with nothing but the chatter of my own thoughts
A simple world at my feet
Before daylight comes to steal it away.
© Laura Hill

Florence Holmes
Bradfield College, Berkshire

High Tide
Because my memories are gritted with the tang of salt,
The wind fierce on legs flecked with sea spit,
A seagull’s call is enough.
The shells, crunching whispered paths to their
Ancestors, are ground down to a trickling yellow
Under the stretched, aching canopy
Of blue.
My hands do not know how to write a decade of love.
But kneeling below the wind’s weight,
Not looking from the ground I cling to,
A groove appears behind my finger.

Words form in the deepness of sand,
Like the half moons of nails cutting with horrified
Thrill into a child’s smooth arm, marking it.
I wonder if they could be seen from space.
The sea approaches steadily, breathy
Behind my crouched form.  Breakwaters,
Brown crumbled arms reaching out to the water,
Fail to hold it off and sigh-surrender themselves to
Immersion.
The same immersion which caresses words,
Even as they are erased to
Blankness.

We haven’t yet learnt the simple rules of time.
I look down; see the dark dot of a girl curled into sand,
The rows of letters which still are not enough
For even one moment of your love spilling into sea,
Existence come and gone in the call of a seagull, descending.
© Florence Holmes

Shona Jackson
Cardinal Newman College, Lancashire
On The Top Step

On the top step of the stairs
At the height of everything.
How wonderful it would be
To watch another life unfurl,
To see each petal grow and brown,
In a seamless fraying string
Of first steps and first loves
Shared beneath a sycamore,
Of loss and ache and quiet pain
Cursed at the bathroom floor.
And the realization
That all we have is to endure.

On the top step of the stairs
What was the height?
Did it lie in every simple kiss
Goodnight poised on pointed toes?
Or in the simplicity
Of silent understanding,
Of an arm reached around
To catch the pieces
When they fell,
Or in the power of letting go
When tears make heart shaped marks
Upon the carpet tread.

On the top step of the stairs
Sometimes height
Only takes you further
From everything that matters;
To feel the warmth of love,
To feel the cold of rain after a storm,
To know the blue print
Would do no good.
And living is not to sit and wait and watch,
But to touch and feel and laugh and cry.
No, living’s not too much.
© Shona Jackson

Sarah Lucas
Burgess Hill School for Girls, West Sussex
Jersey

The locals caved in the tunnels once They
had gone and only excavated  them  later,
hauling the guns back up the cliffs
and pointing them futilely out to sea.
            Not exactly ironic.  But there must be some label
            for this strange reversal to make sense of it...
A joke Occupation because, you see,
the guns were never fired in anger.
I’d laugh: a monumental waste of time, but
graves make this hard for me to do.
At least the dank air conforms to my idea of pathetic fallacy.
          ...I want to write a book,
          but need a simple, succinct phrase for the dust jacket
          And cannot find one.
© Sarah Lucas

Violet Macdonald
Home educated, Oxfordshire
The ruins

Once you were looking for something –
as if searching for the cryptic crossword scripted in my eyes.
I wondered where that other you had gone –
and who was this persona, left blindly searching pills
and 24 hour takeaways for life.

Once there had been the other you
who had seen so much of the world and had only just begun,
and now all that was left was the afterbirth, existing only to await its burial,
trying to find some way back to the shadows where it belonged.

You clung to something meaningless I said,
that you claimed contained the genesis –
the hope that was once bleeding through your veins was
slowed now, by the amphetamines.
The vodka dead stare of your crushed glass eyes –
broken bottles reflected back at me
all that I thought
you never would be.

You were smiling and waving and called to me
that everything seemed so simple now,
that finally you had cleared your head and
we could start again, the two of us,
just like it used to be.
But the vultures picked you out
and disposed of you in those poppy fields.
I smell the burning feathers
And pray it’s a phoenix.
© Violet Macdonald

Emma Mackilligin
Collingham College, London

A Love Poem.
Let’s listen to The Band
and dance until our breath gets lost
somewhere between lung and lip.

Then we’ll collapse in a mess of limbs,
against the sound of our happy-sad laughter.
I feel like crying
but my tears would fall on your cheeks

So instead we laugh
and it rings loud through open windows
as we clutch each other in joyful despair.

We fall silent,
You fall asleep,
I fall in love with you again.
Tangled in fear and pain and crumpled bed sheets
we sleep on a single mattress
on the dusty floor
of our crumbly flat.

Early morning sun is milky and weak and pale.
It makes the dust dance dimly
in the thick summer air.

I look at your watch –
Five a.m.

Our curtains are lace –
Pretty
But useless.
But so pretty.

You stretch a little
And stroke my hair and kiss my bony wrist.
I sigh softly
and shut my eyes against the day and we sleep
till six p.m.

We listen to The Kinks
and dance and sing and drink
and laugh and leave
our perfect mattress
to rejoin the world.

For an hour or four
or as many as we can bear
before the longing
to be silent and still
and together and alone
Overtakes and overcomes.

Then we retreat
to our beautiful, broken, little room
and fill another day
with sleeps and sighs
and secret smiles
until the music starts again.
© Emma Mackilligin

Bethany McColl
Cranbrook School, Kent
Freedom from Complexity

A man once wrote that we are mad to live,
And out of context as that is –
I see his point.

This I scribbled in the corner of my head,
Hastily, with the rest of the odd things
And over and again I said and I said and I said
‘It’s simple enough’, I said.
And so I chose a day (though why today, I couldn’t say)

The day before it seemed
That my heart and my head went down like divers
To halt in the deep sea and live like pearls
Or drown, sticky with salt
And like a broken record say;
‘I couldn’t breathe there, anyway’

For months I’d ask you what it meant,
So over and again you said (and you said)
That it was a freedom from the ways we live,
Our complex days and what we did.

So we watched the sky, like the belly of heaven
Pour out the last of the flat rays,
And as the sunlight died around your face you turned to mine and said
‘If freedom’s what you want, you’re better off alive instead’.

Tomorrow I won’t remember this,
And if you ask me why my lungs look big
I’ll tell you these are not my blue lips or wet hair,
It wasn’t me that dove down there.
Maybe it is that I am mad to live,
But here I am
Alive and atomising in the burning air.
© Bethany McColl

Ciaran McCormick
Westcliff High School for Boys, Essex
Running

Begin to run. Through the glistening glades of a
Window-shopping complex.  Stars twinkle like
Bombs and thunder declares its rage. Feet
Abuse the crazy paving, the teeth of stone steps.
The avenue.  I see the loose threads of the patchwork public
Ribbon around me in roads.
Turn the corner. Run where red light districts bleed into
Brilliant bright, White Way theatres and where
Sham glitz and glam dazzles like blindness.
Hotfoot through the gold coast throng of penthouses,
Who socialise with high hotels propped by pedestals.
Run through complicated streets.
People gavel their judgement with falling feet,
On my slapdash coiffeur, my complexion and  my genetic makeup.

I am not running away anymore – not here in simplicity.
Now, my footsteps flow over the flood of
Grass with the slow, sleeping, creeping, crawl
Of roots. In wind, the waves of the seas
Of the grass leisure beneath the
Dipping and budding mountains:
The balanced and decided destiny of distance.
What could be simpler than the
Virid vista that unveils itself for me?
A clover of vast symmetry for luck without logic.
Leaf with veins like life but without the complications
Of emotions and aspirations. It can aspire only to the
Fading ground.
© Ciaran McCormick

Anne-Marie Mongan
St Michael’s Grammar School, Co. Armagh

Simplicity
I trace your lifeline with my fingertips,
follow the heart monitor’s spikes and dips,
try to understand the fluctuations.
Your hands, white like December sky,
tangle in sterile sheets and I wonder
if you are fumbling for life as it slips

into nights spent searching for the traces
of yourself that you left in the spaces
between bare lights, hanging on to heartstrings
too painful to unravel because they are
as twisted together as two gold chains
that have spent decades in the same places.

Time is measured in heartbeats and Styrofoam
cups of tea, carried by people who roam
cold corridors, half-existent, counting
each frigid breath as it hangs suspended
in the darkness like the ghost of a thought
of contentment faded like wallpaper in a home

that seems alien after days confined
to identical white rooms.  The sunshine,
climbing through half-drawn blinds, draws cell bars
on your skin while the heart monitor counts
beats like a broken metronome.  I can’t help
but think; is simplicity a straight line?
© Anne-Marie Mongan

Rose Naing
Royal Grammar School, Newcastle

L’Alcove Rose

      Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
      Draw from the deer; but as she fleeth afore
      Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore
      Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

The laughs that lie upon the shore,
Of footsteps lost among the sand,
Of shoes all scuffed beside the door,
Against the old umbrella stand.
The auburn days beyond the park
A violet swaying in the breeze,
A heart of light amidst the dark,
That flickers through the sound of trees.
How can I still begin to speak,
Of fears that plague the living mind?
You plague my thoughts, week by week,
To search the chasms of mankind.
The raindrops peppered in your hair –
What need have you to ever care?    
© Rose Naing

Catherine Olver
St Paul’s Girls’ School, London
Grandma’s House

Cobwebs bind peeling paint
to the window-frames, trying
to sew them together again.

The house is an empty purse: full of spiders
that hatch in the eaves and dance along
their eight-legged pathways in the quiet.

In the spare rooms every bed is made.
On each bedside table, a lamp, a book,
a handkerchief embroidered with dust.
Tendrils and flowers climb away from the light.

The walls of the kitchen are lined with postcards
mapping the boundaries of the cupboards –
an island floats above the draining rack.

At perfectly-spaced intervals of table,
place-names as if for seven guests
mark out the continents of time

in an ocean of post-it notes.
Take pills at nine. Turn off the gas.
© Catherine Olver

Emma Pearcey
Portsmouth College
Untitled

What if
the world ended
and we watched it crumble around us?
We could stand on the precipice;
everything else would fall away
and we’d be all that was left.
You’d say:
Look. There’s nothing but us.
None of it matters. Look.
And I’d look at you,
with the wind and dust in your hair,
tangled,
gloriously knotted,
and I’d take your hand in mine.
You’d squeeze, once,
and I’d squeeze back;
my arm would go around you
and we’d hold on –
to life, to death,
to sanity and each other –
we’d hold each other
and we’d watch,
silently watch,
as the world fell away.
© Emma Pearcey

Sophie Phillips
Merchant Taylors’ Girls’ School, Liverpool
Simplicity

Beneath black branches
The carnival rages
Drowning in a greasy mix of colour and hormones.
Outside, Chinese dragons bear down upon me
The guards veined blue with marrow cold
Tourniquet to the synaesthesia of another’s hands inside your womb.
Sweaty fear gropes blindly across your lap
Pours its acrid fester down your ear
While leathery ropes tie you together with flaxen words and wine-soaked thread
And as I watch I notice your nails are shaped like almonds.
A marker lost in history’s pages
Plumbing the depths for crosshair coordinates
Where by lamplight you unlace my spine from Fear’s corset
Stitched to nerve endings
A melanoma of embroidered oak walls
And strategic panic
Blinkered rooks that sense the arches across a gingham floor.
We slide back to fetters willingly
I will always follow you in high-heeled shoes
Over ground painted with winter and lustful eyes.
And flawed by bureaucracy’s straight flush of preachers
Apostates dance a foxtrot with a drunk prison wall.
The city’s elegy of a ciphered sunset plays along a Möbius strip
As modern life roars its oily wheels down the highway
Lie down beside me as the sky blushes pink
The dew drips in time to your a cappella note
Running into the morning Dawn spilt from her cup.
Let me feel as your skin and mouth
Are warmed by sunlight’s splendid gaze
as your bloodstream sings in tune with mine
On a morning’s mountainside.
© Sophie Phillips

Alexa Robertson
St Teresa’s School, Surrey
A Natural Resurrection

Empty and hard.  Like that brazen attitude of separation
forcing us to part flushed with indifference.

Or cold, like that instinctual utterance that Nature is self
sufficient, beyond morality, further than reason, much
deeper than patience. Features of life we cling to which in
a plant’s mind could fill a cup.

Rulers and tracing paper; the things I once knew. Those
shapes and scales scarf us with a heartless quality and
fathomless end, which Nature cannot see drooping upon a
wizened stem.

I’m told symmetry will bleed itself when hearts become
interconnected, linked up in a whole pulsed chain.  That we
are living mirrors that bleed into each other

That polarity will soften itself, conglutinate like healing
flesh and become wisps, a simple trace. While poetry, I
know, that’s the blood surge wreathed in neutrality, when
those red heart strings will sing out a symphony

I’m told we’ll be safe. Safe and assured as colour is when
recognition will seep and unveil itself so blindingly.  We will
be made clean again, evaporate in the antiseptic sun. A
white poultice touching everything

The simple dawn – you affirm this resurrection held
crocked in nature’s fingers.  I’m told forgiveness teaches
surrender to comply when end draws close, that love and
hate create themselves – we wear them like some rusting
badge only to be discarded, a dying recognition. I can see
they are world-embracing and once extinguished we will
be reborn

in simplicity right here

I’m told faith is required, but in seeming more severe than
that cold hard emptiness we continue to stay there. But
warm on the inside they say, like every human heart.

Until then we comply with staunched bindings racked in
opposites, burning up in brave flame like love’s tolerance.
© Alexa Robertson

Fielding Ronshaugen
Cheadle Hulme School, Cheshire

Contrasts Between Watch and Stone
(Or William Paley)

I.    Watch
Cold silver chained tight to your pocket
keeps hands locked still or swift,
metal hours under crystal.
The tick, tick, tick is the sound of your
thinking mind’s trick to measure
without getting lost in long moments.
The simple wind-up circle knows
every second you let slip.

Careful – must be wound lest it forget.
All parts were made to fit.
Weary, wretched watch: like many created things,
there is no mystery in this.

II.    Stone
Sun-warmed, dropped into your pocket
on a walk along the shore.
Colour of sea or a fat grey dove
on the stoop, staying in against wind.
River rolled edgeless, smoothed
to fit your hand like the familiar
sound of a book against a library desk.
Cupped close by kelp, cliffs,
other fingers before and after you:
held safe, you learn the shape by rote.
Steady, sacred stone: like many natural things,
lovely and unknown.

III.    Philosopher
You may be held to the spinning earth
by two heavy simple things
(one for each pocket), but
please say you’ll love best the
random beautiful thing.
© Fielding Ronshaugen

Eleanor Smith
Hereford Cathedral School, Herefordshire
Too simple
In the smog-churned city of my mind,
is a green oblong central park.
I go there when I can, leave behind
twisting streets of narrative arc,
stride on under swaying criss-cross wires,
loud billboards forcing unwanted desires.

I reach a footbridge, and there we stand.
A quiet glance at you, you take my hand.
Your soft name repeats itself in my ear,
like the murmuring water, crystal clear.

I have the scene reduced to its very essence,
arranged with a geometric precision,
the hinted-at colours exacting your presence.
Mathematically planned, no room for decision,
but your eyes, wide tender blue,
catch me here – fall? I try not to.

The light is important, a late orange glare,
which draws electric summer smell from the air.
You tell me you love me with a sweet sigh,
when no words are spoken there can be no lie.

But I’m a poor engineer, and when a blast
of cranked-up radio noise drives past,
the bridge, unhinged, collapses and I fall.
You disappear into the dust cloud of it all.
Open the window, your profile appears.
He has his arm around you, and he sneers.

I should have known, what is simple can never be true;
entropy rising, I invented myself, not you.
© Eleanor Smith

Sunny Solomons
Lancing College, Sussex
The World We Live In
Rising and falling like the soft scudding sea
The gusts of the heart float my thoughts
To the unchanging horizons of life.

Dreams may come to haunt the mind
Imagination making this world
A less simple home for man.

But still I follow the darkness
Instead of the promising stars
While the tide flows on

And on the rhythmic beating
The drum that never misses
A beat until the end of time.

Moments of passion; a book reread
Pull of the stomach for primitive bread
The instant forgetting of

Tastes on a tingling palette
That paint a picture
Of perfect content

From shadow to shadow
In a straight columned church
The hands turn

The wheels rattle
A line across the land
We eat, we drink, we sleep, we love.
© Sunny Solomons

Kerry Tamblyn
Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, Cheshire
Simplicity
Alone, and the stroke of my pen on the page
is the dance,
the fragile escape of bubbles:
two, three rising,
is that search for connection,
the tracing of someone’s words long ago
from some lost age,
is the hope of a spark,
is the blaze of that blinded reach in the dark,
is that desperate grasp
of that last burnt full stop
and the drop
of surrendering pen in a graceless arc.

And if one reaching out in the dark of sleep,
one man in a crowd, or one, on the brink, calling out loud
in search of just one thing    (love?)
should feel, just-not-enough,
the whisper, the tentative connection
like the brush of bubble skin,
then why not here? why not now?
when the hope of that feeling,
that trying to understand
is the most basically human,
the most distant and sudden,
and the pen and the paper are that purest collision –
the simple touch of hands.

               .  .  .

But I stand
and I leave the pen
and I leave the room,
and the complicated whirl of life in cartoon slides is bright and dizzying,
and there are many things for which we search
but none that simple, none that pure.

              .  .  .

Behind closed doors, the pen and the paper,
a stolen moment of humanity: the breeze rolls the nib,
the ink flows
and the bubble cheeks kiss,
bump then part
spiral        out        up
away
but still, for that one second,
that momentary touch of skin to skin,
that almost not there press
of locked-in air,
that simplest rare occurrence: touch
            (outside and in)
their malleable selves carry the mark
of the other’s sudden skin.
© Kerry Tamblyn

Hannah Tran
Dalriada School, Co. Derry, Northern Ireland
Elegy For
There from birth.
I saw you, and I knew.
On my knees.
Then feet laughing, in leaves golden.
Then a bright rope
Spilling from a fat wax crayon.
Fear rage joy hope.
Moon’s silvering fresh dawn.
A Christmas believed
(A year on, I grieved).
This was you.

Then you left.
Or are dead; a short life led.
Was it me?
-  For rage turns to duplicity (Coiling
Snakes will simmer,
Writhe, wrapped and trapped and jet as sin)
Mirrors shimmer,
Swoop still and shatter-thin,
Warping forever.
Realities sever.
Here, I lie.

Then knowledge.
So slyly-faced, takes your place.
Stop it please –
Heart’s scarlet pulse will still believe in you.
Ropes fray, fade, stressed.
Breaking lines blur out, gone grey now.
I here know less –
Thoughts twisting away now
- Than ever by you.
I look back. Yet you
Have gone on.
© Hannah Tran

Claudia Turkington
Alton College, Hampshire
The Mild Poem
I am touching up my greys when the phone rings
It is 8:52 in the morning
And the sun is out

You smell of Dostoyevsky
Sound like Tolstoy
Talking of the old men
I sip at my coffee

And count the freckles on your right cheek
There are 47

You insist on paying
I tip the girl a fiver as we leave
Pressing it into her palm like a pact
Because I am an old woman by then
And these things matter
To me

When we are dusty and sour-tasting
You say goodbye with a firm hand
‘It’s been good’ you say
And I have to laugh
When we are 61
You feel like Byron should
© Claudia Turkington

Jenny Walker
Ullswater Community College, Cumbria
Sometimes my thoughts are older than I am

They wander away from me
sideways,
sidestepping time, place, person.
Those bright Christmas baubles,
paper thin,

Into brambles, bones and earth as dark rich
as if my body gave it my
heart. Moss is growing on ancient stone
aspects, arches vaulting ideas into the air
of this nowhere, everywhere place.
A drop falls with a plink; pure thought
is in the making here.
Mist lies like consciousness over pillars
smoothed by wondering, idle fingers,
which are mine, not mine,
and what a surprise to see my own face
in yours, darling.

This airborne ornate temple, intangible,
nothing but a hum of all our voices, saying,
sometimes my thoughts are older than I am.
© Jenny Walker

Gabrielle Watts
King’s College, Somerset
Lost Dreams
This is my dream:
Be careful with it –
It’s only small.
Its little bones
Are chipped blue mugs,
Wooden orange bowls heavy
With errant change.
Its skin is threadbare
Carpet: sat, slept and loved on,
And yellow curtains stuck
Halfway.
Its glass bauble eyes peer
From dusty wooden shelves.
Darkened watercolours frown
Down over muddied tiles.
In its open mouth books
Smack ivory pages, flapping
Inky tongues and whispers.
Its single chimney ear
Listens to the sky.

Its spine: a kitchen table,
Bends under papers and hairties,
Pens and pins and post-its.
The garden spreads grass-stains
Over its bare concrete toes,
A silver-hazel thumbnail pond
Dances with painted koi.
Mossy tiles fuzz and stumble over
The scalp of my dream, and
Its face watches traffic rush by roaring.

In the river Styx, where all lost things drift
Eventually into Lethe’s velvet murk,
An entire house sinks into the silt.
My simple dream.
A home.
© Gabrielle Watts

Andrew Wynn Owen
Tonbridge School, Kent
Walk
So I need a rhythm, a beat, a fold
in vibrations flowing through the feet –
call it repetition, old condition, but either way
I need to make the floor want more. Beg. Force
the face of the earth to pathfind for me. Scrunch
the toes, wiggle them, squiggle the mud, bend
arches like Philoctetes bow. You know
they’re made for you to screw up. Scrapes
you get into now are practice.  The world
is a forest and a forest, if you see it for
the trees, is a field. Filed under ‘f’. Foot:
appendage – one letter pen of steps. No prob.
Energy and entropy are next – they net
together, do their duet, make ripples. Leave
a line to think on that.  It’s important later.

OK. Carry on. Keep the air pumping,
the organic winches and levers in the legs working
like a band of tubas, in concert. Orchestrate
it all, same time signature behind you but don’t
swivel, nozzle or look back.  Let everything flow
and nuzzle up.  Clear the atmosphere. Mismanaged
mist can scupper us. Don’t kick. Oil
the food pipes, fuel the pneumatic
chambers. Dancing is next week.

Place one foot
in front of the other.
Simple.
© Andrew Wynn Owen