The Academi Cardiff International Poetry Competition

Alan John Winter

Defining Life - A Lapdance of Collectives

A distress of parents
A jibber of siblings

A wampum of schoolchildren
A dry cough of teachers

Bumptious uppenings
Rapacious playdays

Crackle spits from the sumptuous heat of a coal fire, whisky to the skin
Coffee aroma the shop in the village in Denmark, dark from sunlight

Cumberland sausages, Cumberland bacon grandmother’s black stove
And grandmother’s dumpling friend with the hairy wart

Piled debauchery of snow
A whirligig of cream

Mantelpieces of sweets
Helicopter trees

You spook villains, act
Bedozening cajolers, bamboozlers

Honeyed with lies, smeared in selfish almonds
Trestled and daubed

Be not about me
Else I will drag you to the wavelet sea

A pest of pheromones
Forgeries of romance

Office scorpions
A gulch of glitches

Suits of solicitors, a dust of accountants
A wittering of poets

Calamanco collars
Festival restaurants

A crash of aeroplanes
A crèche of Madonnas

The pastoral scenery in a creak of bones
An unseasonable silence. 

Alan John Winter has reached his fiftieth year via a chequered career involving hotels, factories, offices and now may have settled down to be a publican. Although always interested in poetry, he has come to writing late in life. In the last year he has read regularly at Exeter’s Uncut Poets, been published and won minor prizes.