Minimalist Poetry Contest

[firefangled]

people
wait
in your head,

aspirin
on the radio
is there,
you too,
a poem,

almost —

ringing phone

[firefangled]

mistaken posting

[jajdude]

One needs one, nothing to do;
One meets one, one has two;
One hurts one, one runs away;
One is cold, one is clay;
One has no one, no one for fun,
One has nothing, one has none.

[autolycus]

Hmmm. Some of you have posted comments which might (fortunately or unfortunately) be mistaken for entries, being pretty minimalist themselves. So sorry, but could you please let me know (especially if your entry is a single line), if it is meant to be a comment? By default, I shall assume they are all entries.

[YesNo]

Hmmm. Some of you have posted comments which might (fortunately or unfortunately) be mistaken for entries, being pretty minimalist themselves. So sorry, but could you please let me know (especially if your entry is a single line), if it is meant to be a comment? By default, I shall assume they are all entries.

My single line offering was supposed to be a poem. (But who knows what it is. )

I formatted it below to make it look more like a poem. Nice topic by the way.

Zero

A zero here, a zero there
Won't get you anywhere.

[moonbird]

Hmmm. Some of you have posted comments which might (fortunately or unfortunately) be mistaken for entries, being pretty minimalist themselves. So sorry, but could you please let me know (especially if your entry is a single line), if it is meant to be a comment? By default, I shall assume they are all entries.

my 12/14 post is a comment

[DieterM]

Nut tree lifting
its bare branches
like snow-covered arms

Each step a crunch
on the frozen meadow
a white ocean

Alone in winter
with temperatures
below zero

[autolycus]

Excellent, all, so far. I can foresee headaches...

[Silas Thorne]

My earlier posting was a joke. Perhaps you could also take it as a poem.

[krymsonkyng]

It was nt
until the discver y
f nil
_
that math culd prgress
where ever it will

[Haunted]

#0



I’m just fine thanks
yes I got disconnected
no I don’t know the number
no don’t know the name either
ummm actually...........
...........
I have no one to call.
none.
................did you know
......you can implode
in a void
here I am, alone
in a dark place
dying inside as we speak
...
operator can you please
reconnect me

[RaoulDuke]

Zero -
12 o'clock,
Ironsights, muzzleflash,
Potassium nitrate, sickly sweet,
Cast iron earthquake;
The rising sun smoulders
With Bellerophon's fury...
Pain,
Darkness,
Zero.

[zoolane]

Zero Hour

Zero hour approach in dead of sleep.
The body stir with never ending time loop.
The zero hour here.
My stomach cramp with pain.
Did I leave my latest Stephen King in here?

[autolycus]

Results to be announced soon!

[autolycus]

Hello. I was right, a few days in, to realise with sinking heart that there were going to be too many good entries...

There was Moonbird's 'Black Hole', an infinity of nothing, with all the paradox that implies, as well as the clever idea of 00 being ∞ (or something else, even, maybe '..').

Then came Pendragon's neat juxtaposition of the physics and the human condition.

And blank|verse's elegantly typeset, playful little 'zero'. Clever.

And YesNo's little non-geography lesson, so to speak.

Silas Thorne gave me a problem though. I wasn't sure how to read the five little dots. Surely there was an ellipsis in there somewhere. Or not. Then I had an eureka moment and said, "Oh!"

A difficult test was posed by firefangled. The first poem was pretty sharp, a dramatic thumbnail. The second (as usual) supersedes the first. But was the second, 'mistake deleted', meant to be a poem? If so, it was as much a potential winner as the first, and as much a potential winner as the others. But was it an entry?

Jajdude came up with a motif very much like a traditional nursery rhyme. Here was creepy excellence. Or binary excellence. I was beginning to lose myself in ones and nones. Or something.

And then DieterM, who wrote a poem I wished I could have written. Sigh. That nut tree got into my dreams.

It was typical of kryms-nkyng to write s-mething clever which was als- a p-tted hist-ry. The 'h-les' in it were pretty -bvi-us. It's alm-st a classic clerihew. S-rt -f.

I really wished Haunted's poem hadn't quite been so haunting. I could just about imagine a missing persona trying hard not to be quite so missing, and... missing.

And RaoulDuke's evocative rising sun smouldering with Bellerophon's fury, like some mad hybrid of WW2 and Greek myth. Argh. Another great Zero.

The last entry was zoolane's. Understated, with lovely flavour and balance.

=====

And I was stuck. They were pretty much all genuine winners. So I had to make some losers, and none deserved to be. This is the nightmare of everybody who has to moderate such contests around here. Many of you know this well.

=====

I had to settle this by making myself this really picky person. It's hard to decide in the narrow space between zero and zero. I had five winners after a long hard look. But that was technically still four too many. You need one choice so that you get one person running the next show...

=====

In the end, that person was RaoulDuke. Every line has a zero of time, space, existence. There is the beginning of the end and the end of beginning. From one kind of Zero to another. RD, you win because it was a hero among zeroes. Go ahead, start the next one!

And there is an honorable mention for firefangled's 'mistake deleted'. I had to reason that an entry which got rid of itself should win ANY minimalist poetry contest, and hence should be disqualified in a way.

Thanks, everybody!