(mis)printed in this year's Ripple

Prelude – Poem for a competition (never sent)

If this poem does not win your competition I will have your legs broken.

If this poem does not win your competition I will commit suicide with a shot-gun in the whitest room of the Tate Modern.

If this poem does not win your competition I will spread sordid rumours about you having an affair with your secretary/school sweetheart/milkman.

If this poem does not win your competition I will begin a campaign of terror, firebombing every poetry publisher in the country, wounding thousands with shards of shrapnel that rip their flesh as the blast burns them and throws them to the ground.

If this poem does not win your competition I will skin a living dog and post its matted hide to you. I will beat a pensioner into a coma with a bag of bones and the collected works of TS Elliot.

If you do not declare this poem the greatest ever written, if I am not hailed as Britain’s New Young Hope, if this is not replicated in every tube train and anthology I will personally expose myself to a priest, then masturbate on the alter before burning the place down and screaming each unholy word I know at the top of my lungs until my voice disappears and I am dragged away to a police cell/psychiatric hospital by a couple of tit helmeted plods/men in white coats.

If this poem does not win your competition I will write an article about how Sylvia Plath is a greatly over-rated and unnecessary obtuse drama queen and her death was the best thing she ever did, and how even the fascist EzrabPound is better than her. I will then eat said article and several hours later shit it into a jiffy bag and mail it to The Guardian with the letters S.W.A.L.K. inscribed upon the back in my own blood.

However, if this poem does not win your competition I will not stop writing. I will enter a new poem, more passionate and exquisitely crafted every year, I will publish them in my own magazines if I have to. I will not stop until we run out of ink and typewriter ribbon, computers and pencils. I will not stop until the earth is a scorched wasteland inhabited solely by cockroaches that scuttle under a chemical sky.