Creative Writing Competition Entry: 07/08/2014

Poetry Theme: ‘A Dangerous Ambition’

‘The Shelter Given’

In the turning of the bankrupt hours,                                                                  When most charming of the dangers is just                                                              To think and pontificate Nothing
And our red-tinted girls fade into rust.

I am nice
and just about ready
to become an understudy for everyone
Though in the dead breadth of twilight, as the records themselves spun,               you couldn’t help but walk this city
like the proudest idiot
one could, or did, ever dream to see undone.

So it is a seventeen-minute kiss,
congenial and brisk,
that she leaves to your distracted eyes;
in ambition’s thrall, like Larkin’s wake,
in your own adaptation of a ragged soul’s sake                                                    and a sincere confession of a secular mistake:

Let’s assume we’ll talk again
at Danger’s death, with time enough                                                                    And world to spare.