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Reposted by Dean Norton

David Birch @davidbirch.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks again @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk for an excellent #PoemsAbout prompt #ImperfectMe. Here's a poem about the imperfection of yielding to hope over experience

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 12h

John, I am sorry it took so long to get to this, but I was rewarded when I did. A tour de force. W.H. Auden said
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”🙏

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Reposted by Dean Norton

John Chmura @johnchmura.bsky.social · 1d

#PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe
@thebrokenspine.co.uk
I will put a reel in the comments.

IMPERFECT ME

On days my son was measured
in length rather than height
I held him shirtless in one arm
while I lathered my face to shave.
Leaned on my chest, warm,
he plunged an explorer’s hands, decisive,
into my foamy cheeks, gaining agency,
the intimation of form, and play
affirmed in his corporeal birthright.

And me, significant, generative,
like the god of the psalmist,
I could do no wrong.

Whiskey it wasn’t that imperfected me
in his eyes. I may never know
which particular betrayal
inspired that loss of grace.
But it did boost his swagger to say
for the first time fuck you, Dad,
and I absorbed the preordained assertion,
concussive, cracked like a plastic bucket
abandoned on the back porch
when water expands into ice.

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 12h

Karen your words reveal the inevitable cycle of grief. Crushing and so potent. Thank you for your sharing.

Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 13h

Not too long! Worth every line. And such a rich banquet for us to partake in. I won't easily leave this one behind. ✨💥👏❤️‍🔥

Reposted by Dean Norton

lichtbringer @saintghost.bsky.social · 1d

For #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe ✨

for @thebrokenspine.co.uk
& @alanparrywriter.co.uk

I apologize for the ungodly length and extend my sincerest gratitude to everyone who still endeavors to read it. Thank you.

$Mirror, Mirror A spell gone wrong. The fairy godmother quit, left the fire for a cigarette break. My dress is as chintzy as lollipop shivers, as cheap as no-fucks-given first love and even that I could never afford. A broom dressed in a rag, owl-grown on eyelash wishes. A wish is something my heart makes when you sing about how the light weeps through the gauze of the leaves when it falls, like a prayer through stained glass, or a girl’s head through the open mouth of her mother’s medicine cabinet. We all know that things are purified by their falling, by how low they can go before they snap. A wish is the insistence to fall like this just a little bit longer, to sweeten the pulp of my ruin once I collapse into smoke. A dream, however, is a different beast: A dream is something tenebrous that lives in the fractures and marrows, that comes for me like a gorge of gray wolves, ubiquitous and bigger than a life, or a couldn’t, or a death. It makes me think about your teeth, how they tear a signature of grief into my wrist, how I mistook a maw for a sparrow’s beak, and blood for godly devotion. You ask what has touched me without leaving a bruise. Nothing. The brittle hair brown as the mud- crested belly of a fox, hunted, tangled in lilac and bramble, keeping watch over what remains of us and what doesn’t when no one is looking too close. Rings of salt around my eyes where at midnight the crows come and pick apart the waning embers until things lose their focus and become mercurial rivulets of maybe and fever. The olanzapine body, fed too sad on gingerbread and delusions; the one that I carry like a coffin or that in turn shoulders me like a cross, because it has to, because it knows no other way. The flesh-simmering hunger to be not only seen but felt. That deaf violent resistance to any threat or touch of disenchantment.$

And there it is,
the seam that is always giving, where the doctor did
his stitches like someone drunk on the moon. Touch it:
It tells a cicatrized story, one that the sortilege of speaking
could not. I am not only an imperfection but a curse, baptized
in a river’s edge that knows neither map nor ending.
Lids and lips dusted with a summoning of need the color
of last year’s rotten apples; as if there was a ballroom I was going to
instead of a padded cell, as if I had lost a shoe of glass
instead of my agency and sense of self.

All this sorcery, just for that one moment.

Because you promised me an elsewhere and another
time, where truth was untrue and real was only a word
that held as much weight as a twig. Where I could go
and be not prophecy but promise; peach, plum, and palms unread
but understood in the unutterable language of fate.
Where I could be held by a world that does not ask of me
to prove it. But you just made me up, didn’t you, divined my name
in some lapse of reason amidst seal-skinned sirens and antlered
hares. Something to rain away the hours, insubstantial and hidden
behind the veil of absurdity. I come alive in your glimpse only,
in that one wisp of splintered impossibility
and just as soon as you close your eyes, all my fake
bones shatter and crumble.

Looking back, I will then be made to wonder
if I have ever been really here at all.
Did I die or did I vanish
or did you just forget to continue to have faith
in my fabled existence, in the frailty of my
mythology?

Because nothing’s more fatal to a dream
than those who do not believe in it.

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 14h

@karenpgonzalez.bsky.social
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@matt-guntrip-music.bsky.social
@melissampoulton.bsky.social
@janpsolivagant.bsky.social
@thewombwellrainbow.bsky.social

Thank you for the reposts!

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 14h

@karenpgonzalez.bsky.social
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@matt-guntrip-music.bsky.social
@melissampoulton.bsky.social oulton.bsky.social - Thank you for the reposts!

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 18h

Much appreciated sir. 🙏

Reposted by Dean Norton

Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 21h

‘even my clichés are the easy middle’ self-aware, and weary, but sharp as flint. This owns its in-betweenness with honesty. Half this, half that, wholly human. Gorgeous work. #KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 19h

Thank you so much. This is a great space for supporting this kind of work, and I thank you for being part of that. 🙏

Reposted by Dean Norton

Alan Parry He/Him @alanparrywriter.co.uk · 21h

‘the membrane wont part’ nails that sickly in-between—where self blurs & reality won’t let you through. The poem spirals with grace, all static & slip; identity dissolving mid-spin. Stunningly disorienting. #KeepWriting #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 21h

Thank you, Alan. Really wanted to create a dissociative experience.

Reposted by Dean Norton

Glenn Barker @rotherwrites.bsky.social · 1d

Hello @thebrokenspine.co.uk and host @alanparrywriter.co.uk for #PoemsAbout #ImperfectMe.
This week I am personifying the inanimate. I'm not sure about it...

Revelation

Tidal rock
Kicked and scraped
Shoal swimmer
Ocean colour catcher
Beach candy

Hard as nails

Wet clay
Dull-witted grains
Studio tabula rasa
Creator seeded
Shop window dressed

Forever fragile

Carrara marble
Hammer and chisel
Removing nothing
Revealing everything
Brittle hardness

Don’t touch me

© Glenn Barker October 2025

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 21h

All these things and more, right Glenn. Marvelous turn at the prompt. 👏

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 21h

I adore this idea of the ellipses. Brilliant. Our scars and our sags mark our hard-won battles. Our survival. You help us mark them for joy, Merril. Love it.

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Reposted by Dean Norton

Ann Tigone @anntigone.bsky.social · 2d

The mirror me
is shattered glass,
a self in splinters.

Each jagged shard
spreading my flaws
across tiny multitudes.
They dance and mock
in unison

#ImperfectMe #poemsabout
@alanparrywriter.co.uk
@thebrokenspine.co.uk

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 21h

'blanket-covered / like the scene of a murder' is is so visceral and recognizable on multiple levels, within and without. Great work.👏🔥

Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

Thanks, Paul. I had in mind this quote from Ambrose Bierce that "Present" was "That part of eternity dividing the domain of disappointment from the realm of hope." I meant to add that as an epigraph before posting.

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Reposted by Dean Norton

Matt Guntrip @matt-guntrip-music.bsky.social · 1d

I’ve lost my faith in poetry, a personal experience, yet when I saw this brilliant prompt #imperfectme from @thebrokenspine.co.uk & host @alanparrywriter.co.uk it triggered something; so here’s a contribution. It opened it door & could start an avalanche; tread softly..

Je vous remercie
#poemsabout

Track

Another mistake
along the vinyl groove
destination certainty
as if the end will beat
a rhythmic slow-clap
to every personal error
the flawed shoe-string songs
squeezed out of economy-size mediocrity

Errors, meanness, naivety
deficits of courage in adversity
and a few words harvested
from barren rocky soil
too many degrees south
of arable pasture

Matt Guntrip

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

Tracks for me too. Same clock.

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

It’s a example of this community pushing me to do something new. Thank you.

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

lol. Thanks John. OK ante up. I need yours.😉

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

This is bold spadework, indeed. Thank you for a powerful sharing. The final line, so effective. And love the "scares" and "scars" parallel here. 💥

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Dean Norton @zentinl.bsky.social · 1d

Hello @hool415.bsky.social, I am a bit late dropping in on #promptcombo for #Visitor. What a great prompt. Just a little dashed-off piece for fun. #poetrycommunity #poetry #poems #blueskypoets #blueskypoetry

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