Spectator competition: Marking time

Competition 3349 invited you to write a poem riffing on the line ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’, from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, but substituting something else for the spoons.

You came up with rubbish collections, brands of jeans, obsolete technology, library fines, biros, toothpaste tubes, meds, lovers, visits to Wetherspoons, moons, macaroons. It was a large and brilliant entry, painful to whittle down when the marking time came. Those who for space reasons alone haven’t made the final cut were too numerous for any names to be picked out, while those who have win a pony (of the £25 variety).

I have measured out my life with feet –
distorted feet – the daily stock in trade
for me, obscure chiropodist from Lechlade;
ill-favoured feet, some racked by malformation
and every type of fungal infestation.
Hard-wired that nine-to-five was life’s intention
I sold my dreams for safety and a pension;
while braver men blazed journeys to the moon,
supped with the Devil with too short a spoon,
made and lost huge fortunes in a trice
on horses, cards, roulette and loaded dice,
played vast arenas with their four-chord bands,
lay with silk-skinned whores in far-off lands,
or held the fate of nations in their hands.
      Excitement is a risky choice to make.
      Not making it has been my worst mistake.

Martin Parker

I have measured out my life with stroppy goons,
Dim as basement flats if huger than baboons,
They’ve stood about me, surly if unyoked,
While I, their kingpin, ordered, threatened, joked.

At my pleasure, all these fellows were deployed
On my protection, an employment few enjoyed.
While they got their share of liquor, love and loot,
All imagined that they had a stronger suit.

Each one treasured brutish dreams of regicide
With Luger, bare fist, blade or cyanide.
Knowing the score, I’d watch them plot and yearn,
Setting next lunk upon last; they’d never learn.

I have measured out my life in stroppy goons,
Whose lives now seem brief, violent cartoons
And since you’ve asked what my deepest fear is,
It’s that you may be last in that long series.