George Crabbe Poetry Competition 2024 – 2nd Prize
Adjudicator: Luke Wright
Opening the centrefold of a late 90’s culture supplement –
one of many cannibalised for photos of surly pin-ups,
cultish idols and celluloid antiheroes and kept since in loft storage –
I’m tweaked, first by a special filter lolling on a banana lilo,
then, on the end pages, an entourage of carnivorous birds lord it
over haybales of rolled Virginia gold. A Stetson gathers flies.
There’s either meaning within meaning or just sheer baloney,
a ‘screw you’ to the sense-makers of market research.
I write this as a quitter who can attest there’s nothing
as hellish as nicotine’s unstifled cries, a cellular yearning
against all will for the after-dinner smoke replete
with white tablecloth, silver coffee pot, the brushed brass
Zippo with its mild tut when the flint wheel is struck,
a demureness about the eyes as the octaves of guilt climb,
three drags max then let it slough its ash as I relax
back in my camel overcoat: a charmer of carcinogens.
No more. Thank you, clean air laws and Big Tobacco’s
reworked category promise – revel in a moment of low-tar bliss,
exquisite jeopardy, a rigged tombola of potential disease, probable death –
signed, yours disapprovingly, Chief Medical Officer.
But that last flash… when the planners got arch, the creatives
got surreal to stump the High Priests of Public Health,
magazine ads seduced with nooses of purple silk, a scarecrow
in a spacesuit, a butler serving a jester’s heads on a salver,
Beelzebub in a bush hat striding the desert red, enough
to make you reach for a pack, spark and snuff
a match just as the elephant in the rumpus room
stoops to stub out the guttering flame of its trunk.
Copyright © 2024 Samuel Prince