The Poetry Competition

The Scottish Poetry Library meets once a week in a pub, close to my work, to discuss poetry. For years now I've fancied popping in one day on my way home after work, but never got round to it. I think I will soon. Whilst looking at other things they do, I came across a competition in conjunction with the Scottish Book Trust. £2000 for the winner! Not to be sniffed at. I have entered a number of competitions in the last few months for writers or musicians as I've realised that, like the lottery, the most essential step towards winning one of these things is to actually enter. So far I have heard nothing back from the various things I have entered, but I remain in hope. Perhaps there will be hardly any other entries and I will win by default (It has happened before, in my school days, when I won a regional heat of an invention competition by dint of being the only candidate.) Accordingly I have sent a couple of poems that have already appeared on here, along with an old one that I haven't made public before:

The Plain

That the confines of happiness can be
                                        so small,
The encompass of my arms;

When the lonely plain lies so waste:
The life plain of my journey.

Crooked beauty decieves on the plain
The plain of the pure truth of decay
The limitless plain of all steps
               So vast its terror:
I trek to sure horizon.

The plain whose only tree
is the bitter fruit of knowledge
And only vantage a better view of nothing:
The plain whose only end is death.

Here it is spend my days
In solitude and emptiness.

Wish me luck!