Rules:

• Each poem must be made from words formed in a hypothetical game of Scrabble, in order, with no inserted or deleted letters. Multiple words count.
• Any letters left over must be declared. One should have no letters left over although one or two is acceptable.
• Inventing words is okay.
• Each poem must be a functioning stand-alone poem that makes sense.

 

So soon? For newly wax before the sky

javelins firing in jets of night

zephyring toward the quiet moon.

Then our sail glides, limber or nude

to cover: an arc. A….

 

 

 

 

 

No, that won’t do. A blank page will never speak

the stirs of silence that will overtake

all sense, rather than just alleviate

the daily headaches of our Twitter feed.

 

Fine. I’ll try to show you what I mean.

 

You see? Here we are. Right back again

where we left it. Dry old patterns on a screen

(or page!?), type-faced. It simply does not work.

Like an interval within a play,

maybe. After B and A’s exchange

 

They take a break. You fill in every word

when “silence” is so much more. It is, I’d say,

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a sequence of sonnets, all of which are missing one vowel, for pointless pretentious reasons that the Reader is best left to discover.

Grail Sonnet IV

Every other moment blue-grey slabs of stone

are sculpted as a monument of dawn

and she appears as clear as before –

but, because you haven’t ever loved a ghost

you get ready for another day alone.

But then you feel her press these marble claws

and hear her, gentle, enter through your core,

and occupy your body as a host.

You’ve never even loved a ghost before

and assumed somehow a ghost’s one human form

but her ghost’s every ghost you heard that day

or every sound that scraped the hard, stone floor

or other ghost that laboured to be born

under the sculpture of that blue-and-grey.