Competition

Highly Commended

Untitled
by Bethany House

This girl is Untitled,
She has no name.

Lying in the street,
She has no home.

This girl is Unwanted,
She is not necessary.

Crying in the street,
She is only a baby.

This girl is Unloved,
She receives no care.

Dying in the street,
She does not understand.

Lying, Crying, Dying
She was.

Now she does not feel.
Still Untitled
Still Unwanted
Still Unloved
But unfeeling.

Highly Commended

"Today is...."
by Jesse Brooke

Today is as sleepy as the grey clouds.
Today is the tired brush against acoustic guitar strings.
Today is the pushed crawl of a broken down Datsun.
Today is as repetitive as The Simpson's episodes.
Today I drag my sleepwalking body through the day

Highly Commended

An Ode to Math
by Caitlin Stark

At the risk of sounding just a little obtuse
I often wander if the maths I do at school, will be of any use.
Be it Pythagoras's Theorem or a Cartesian plane
My gradient-intercept will never be the same.

And what is meant exactly by a Fractional expression?
Just the sound of it, leaves me with an angle of depression.
Apparently a vulgar fraction is really very common.
Simply because it has a denominator on its bottom.

Euler's (oilers) Formula sounds like something I should drink
But it's something to do with convex polyhedra ... I think!
I suppose, compound inequality is where my problem lies.
For my mathematical inequalities are definitely on the rise.

Complimentary angles I find really are two (a )cute.
In general most mathematical algorithms are not my strongest suit.

Algebra, angles, arithmetic and axis.
Bases, beta, bounds, brackets and braces.
Calculus, conjugates, composites and cis
Although there are 23 letters to complete this alphabetical list
I think after the last three lines I had better desist.