Be a poet, but keep it to forty lines. Free form or paragraphs are preferred over rhymes. Caps and punctuation you can certainly forget. Confusing and cryptic will be your best bet. Don’t include politics, depression or death. Poems like that are a waste of your breath. Instead, you should mention the lakes and the trees, the mountains, the flowers, the birds and the bees. Don’t forget oceans and weather and seasons-- any such subjects are always good reasons. Be sure to include some thesaurus-type words, and convert at least one adjective into a verb! Be creative with spacing, give a title to tease, and with short sentence fragments, the judges you’ll please. Then, just send in those fees with your poems, no rush. It’ll be some months later when your hopes will be crushed. Your dollars were wasted on one more contest. Your silly poems just failed to impress. Still, you’ll need to keep writing for yourself and your friends. How you see it and say it is what really depends.