[John Whitworth]

The Muse made him. She is very insistent, you know.

[Brian Allgar]

We are not a Muse.

[Martin Elster]

Thanks, Brian. You've come up with some truly inspired takes yourself. Your spoof is priceless.

I fiddled around a bit more with my approach in post #105. I like the vagueness of the original, which contains tinges of SF or surrealism. But I just pasted in a more "realistic" version below it (about a debilitated car). Which do you like better?

[Graham King]

Originally Posted by Martin Elster

...I fiddled around a bit more with my approach in post #105. I like the vagueness of the original, which contains tinges of SF or surrealism. But I just pasted in a more "realistic" version below it (about a debilitated car). Which do you like better?

I love SF so, unsurprisingly I like the first, more SF, one better. I think it allows the reader's imagination freer play (and leaves one guessing, tantalisingly but pleasingly, at exactly what form of being is undergoing this treatment) whereas the direct car reference ties it down to a literal referent which makes the personal approach harder to identify with.

[Graham King]

(I composed my own before reading others' work here - as usual. Some phrases, such as Great Plains, recur - to be expected, given the form of this competition.)
I often debate with myself what punctuation to use at line-ends; comments welcome!

Homesteads

We lived a farming life on the Great Plains.
Adventure was the colour of each day!
We’d skip our houses, stay for hours away…
At last, waltz home; be scolded for our stains
On clothes and skin - we didn’t mind the pains
Of all those scrapes and falls! Her name was May.
Through Spring and Summer-long we’d talk and play;
At last there came the thunder and the rains,
The season of the yellowing of leaves;
We, like the crops, had stored up stock of suns
And stood now taller, like the gathered sheaves.
I cherish now, and will, till end of breath
The fondness of those days. When my blood runs
Its last, we’ll meet… on Greater Plains of death.

[Mary McLean]

Bright Star, My Aunt Fanny

How should one kill a poet who complains
about his bloody cough all night and day?
A fiancée can never get away
from pillow talk of gruesome pillow stains.
He’s half consumed by his consumptive pains.
It wouldn’t be surprising if in May
he's crushed beneath a Grecian urn display.
Expose him to the ‘gentle’ Summer rains;
sans merci, brew some belladonna leaves;
use lenses to refocus Autumn suns
upon his clothing; choke him with some sheaves
from Chapman’s Homer (might improve his breath).
Or you can wait until his doctor runs
him off to Rome. That ought to spell his death.

[Graham King]

Originally Posted by Mary McLean

Bright Star, My Aunt Fanny

How should one kill a poet who complains
about his bloody cough all night and day?
A fiancée can never get away
from pillow talk of gruesome pillow stains.
He’s half consumed by his consumptive pains.
It wouldn’t be surprising if he may
be crushed beneath a Grecian urn display.
Expose him to the ‘gentle’ Summer rains;
sans merci, brew some belladonna leaves;
use lenses to refocus Autumn suns
upon his clothing; choke him with some sheaves
from Chapman’s Homer (might improve his breath).
Or you can wait until his doctor runs
him off to Italy. They’ll be his death.

Ruthlessly clever, mercilessly amusing, Mary!
Another very different tack taken, from the shared 'givens'!

[Nigel Mace]

Excellently sour, Mary. This one will stick in the mind whatever happens. Great respect,

Nigel

[Martin Elster]

Graham, fellow SF fan - Many thanks for letting me know your preference. I like your Great Plains impression very much.

And Mary, yours is excellent (though downright cruel). Now I'll have to try to write something with more poetic license with the rhymes (as you did). So far I've stuck entirely to the given words without embellishment (because of all that talk about having to be exact early in the thread).

By the way, John and Jayne, if I want to enter several poems, do I send them all in one e-mail or each one in its own e-mail?

[Peter Goulding]

Never done this exercise before. It's bloody hard to make it flow logically. Decided therefore to go for the nonsense rhyme - the synopsis of my forthcoming musical about Sting.

Red-light Roxanne dumps him. He is too creepy, she explains.
So Sting resolves to call her up a thousand times a day,
although he suspects he might be wishing his days away.
He can’t stand losing her, so he flies to the moon, tear stains
on his spacesuit. There, he breaks his legs, to add to his pains.
(Luckily he hasn’t copped she is really Brian May.)
Then he meets a legal alien and begins to play
Da Do Do Do for it but it shuffles away. Sting leaves
the moon, muttering some tat about invisible suns.
Back home, he is so lonely, so lonely that he stuffs sheaves
of messages inside bottles, watching every last breath
she takes, every move she makes, until finally she runs
dementedly from him, shrieking, “Oh Sting, where is thy death?”