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Category: Deception

358 • Stocking-filler

358 • Stocking-filler

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‘Folk guess I’m a big Dylan fan
From the name on my fruiterer’s van.
But I don’t deal in rumours,
I deal in satsumas,’
Said Hamish the Tangerine Man.

The unfortunate costermonger at the heart of this brief report was assassinated, one Manchester market-day, by a maniac brandishing a knife and shouting ‘Judas’. At the funeral, Hamish’s widow justified an unusual choice of music by reading from his last will and testament: ‘As the coffin sinks from sight, Mr Tambourine Man is the last music I want to hear.’ Such wording, infused with ambiguities worthy of the Pied Piper of Hibbing himself, convinced certain mourners that Hamish had been telling the truth … he’d never been a big Dylan fan at all. ‘Untangle that if you can,’ whispered the priest as we left the crematorium.

357 • Capricorn

357 • Capricorn

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The upcoming month looks a mess
For Capricorn: doom and distress,
Your children disgraced,
Your garden laid waste,
And minimal chance of redress.

Waking at dawn under the zodiacal sign of the Goat, I remain convinced that the practitioner of astrology is an expert in whom we can justly place our trust in troubled times.

349 • Take-away (4)

349 • Take-away (4)

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Regarding the death of my former
Relation (the one known as Norma)
Just tell the police
She’s no longer my niece
And that was the cause of her trauma.
NOW BRING ME A VEGETABLE KORMA.

Proof, if proof were needed, that a lazy diet of convenience food can induce circular, or even Moebius, reasoning: not at all what we typically expect from a thoughtful assassin.

344 • Christmas Market

344 • Christmas Market

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We sell mostly flotsam and jetsam
Step in for a moment, and get some:
Our clients buy masses
To mix with molasses
And massage Mama (when she lets ’em).

So the customers wait in a line,
Their patience much greater than mine.
When I shout, ‘Go to hell,
I have nothing to sell,’
They beam at me, bland and benign.

This morning’s bulletin is a triptych depiction of the insanitary madness of Yuletide shopping: first the barker openly declaring the worthlessness of his wares; then the unseemly comfort products foisted on our nearest and/or dearest when other inspiration fails; and finally the line-up – outside a depleted store – of zombie-like shoppers, their wits irremediably stultified by the worthless circus of capitalism.

342 • Hard to believe

342 • Hard to believe

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Please note, we have film of your bride
In flagrante with Jekyll and Hyde;
All three wear top hats
And extravagant spats
But pretty well nothing beside.

Though the camera-work is cockeyed
Maud’s ardour cannot be denied,
And it’s hard to believe
What the two gents achieve
In the detail our drone has espied.

Your Worship may feel mortified
That he can’t always spot who’s astride
Nor indeed understand
Who has got the whip hand:
But the action is all bona fide.

So unless you are quick to provide
Thirty guineas to [details supplied]
Maud’s countless coitions
In startling positions
Will justly be famous worldwide.

Any husband would surely be disappointed to receive a note of this type, since it reveals the blackmailer not as some harmless voyeur (or voyeuse), but as a hardboiled extortionist who paints a needlessly lurid picture of the young wife’s uninhibited appetite and proclivities. Yet in this particular case the cuckold, addressed as ‘Your Worship’, is clearly a member of The Establishment and, as such, axiomatically more corrupt by far than his unjustly denigrated spouse. It seems probable, therefore, that her two partners-in-film are in fact the blackmailers, and they plan to split the spoils with their vivacious copulee. Let us hope those shares are at least equal.

340 • Cruise control

340 • Cruise control

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Please note that your humming-bird, Rex,
Is banned from the passenger decks.
We’re aware he’s a drone
Surreptitiously flown
To observe while our Captain has sex.

All kinds of questions arise when we imagine the shipboard arrangements that necessitated the above communique. (And, rather than offering reassurance, the fact that feckless recreational drones are being banned by winter cruise operators merely reminds us how seriously landlubbers’ privacy is compromised by the unpoliced residue – which throng our city skylines at the prying beck and call of amorally ruthless surveillance professionals.)

335 • Minnie’s Boys

335 • Minnie’s Boys

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Holed up in a comedy depôt
In fascist-held downtown Aleppo:
While Chico and Harpo
Bewitch the Gestapo,
Watch Groucho bewildering Zeppo.

Even the sharpest satire will eventually be blunted and rendered obscure by tectonic shifts in the Zeitgeist. But the Marxes’ exuberant indifference to hierarchy, dismissal of propriety, and unravelling of logic make them uniquely vibrant mentors for dissidents down the ages. Marvellously the ostensible cipher Zeppo (who died on today’s date in 1979) was, in their Vaudeville heyday, the most giftedly insidious of the four, depping on stage with seamless, imperceptible brilliance no matter which of his heterogenous siblings was indisposed or unavailable.

334 • Sole-searching

334 • Sole-searching

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I hoped to make sense of your views
By walking a mile in your shoes.
But one glimpse of the soles
Scorched by burning hot coals
Means I need no additional clues.

Let us pause, this morning, to think back over the long, dark history of Western culture. It may perhaps be illuminating to try to pinpoint the moment when the ascetic and the self-harmer ceased to be considered uplifting role-models.

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

331 • Tantamount to Extortion

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Don’t dine at the Café du Nord
Without checking their prices beford.
One glance at the bill
For my spoonful of krill
Left me gasping for breath on the flord.

Certainly this First Year of Covid has made it hard for restaurateurs to balance their books; but habitual diners-out – having subsisted on nothing but beans-on-toast since lockdown started – fancy they’ve saved enough moolah to laugh off the Himalayan prices the more pretentious places are charging. In my naïvete I imagined that ordering nothing but an amuse-gueule would spare me financial discomfort. How wrong I was.

325 • Like ostriches

325 • Like ostriches

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It was back in the first days of Spring
You promised our plans would take wing.
Now that Winter is nigh,
Have we started to fly?
No. We haven’t accomplished a thing.

The finger of blame can always be relied upon to point at the nearest and/or dearest of the person on whose passive-aggressive hand it is growing. Still, this is better than pointing at ‘the year’ or ‘the virus’; though clearly the real blight on all our souls at this epoch is still festering moodily somewhere in the vicinity of the Oval Orifice.

320 • The Apple

320 • The Apple

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Yelled Adam to Cain, ‘Listen lad,
Don’t feed that big snake: he looks bad.’
Whispered Eve, ‘It’s OK:
Take an apple a day
For your real, biological dad.’

‘Every harlot was a virgin once‘, our Great Poet reminds us; in similar spirit this morning’s sermon invites us to reconsider the First Fratricide who, as a blameless tot, feels an instinctive kinship with the serpent that seduced his mother. Adam’s mistrust of the entity that cuckolded him is understandable; yet contradictory parenting ensues, undoubtedly sowing the seeds of Cain’s transgressive development. Wiser heads than mine must ponder how Mary and Joseph sidestepped this problem, when a similar predicament beset their own relationship.

308 • A Sensible Choice?

308 • A Sensible Choice?

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Lock that ape in his airtight Rolls Royce
Till it stifles his snide, stupid voice.
Draw a line in the sand.
Send a sign to the land:
Maybe, this time, a Sensible Choice?

Three instructions for November 3.

307 • Polemicist

307 • Polemicist

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I went to meet George Bernard Shaw
But his concubine answered the door:
‘Will you plese go away?
Hes at work on a play
As Ive told you nineteen times befor.’

And so we seek out another well-regarded dramatist, three score and ten years on from his last mortal breath … but in vain. He was probably tinkering with spelling reform that evening, not writing anything sensible at all. In any case the famous Socialists, anti-vaxers and eugenicists of yesteryear can be of no avail in the present crisis; the past is gone; and the future’s gone too, unless the electorate votes with its wisest imagination.

302 • Against the day

302 • Against the day

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America, rise! There’s a war on
More epic than Gandalf v Sauron:
You can vote, by the 3rd,
For The Truth and The Word,
Or the megalomaniac moron.

An Amazon blurb in 2006 announced a new novel set in ‘a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places’. Some believed those words were written by the novelist himself, Thomas Pynchon. Others are certain that they were penned by a time-travelling fugitive from today’s Washington, where a farcical tragedy is unfolding in which we have all been given a part. If this were played upon a stage … I could condemn it as an improbable fiction. But fiction it ain’t. We gotta get shot of the Ramblin’ Man. I’m pynchin’ myself, but I don’t bite my tongue: You hear me Tolkien to ya?

301 • Naked cheek

301 • Naked cheek

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We beheld an old Burgher of Calais
Who’d come, without clothes, to The Ballet.
When they called him immoral
He said, ‘Do not quarrel
With me: take it up with my valet.’

As ever, the challenge to a wealthy pervert’s idiosyncrasy is brushed aside, and the onus of explanation – and inevitable blame – falls on the shoulders of his hapless factotum.

297 • Scorpio

297 • Scorpio

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Dear Scorpio: what can I say?
Catastrophe’s heading your way:
Viral mishaps,
Economic collapse.
You may want to call it a day.

Waking to a new morning, as the celestial scorpion comes into its own, I’m surely not alone in deriving great strength from the impartial counsel of the astrologer, whose infallible sagacity shines out like a beacon against the drossy darkness of science, common sense, and associated delusions.

289 • Born again

289 • Born again

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Hey presto! One wave of this wand,
And I wake as a Hollywood blonde!
And how fancy it feels
In my falsies and heels
Being hailed the first female James Bond.

Our enlightened times have seen strong and righteous pressure for certain iconic screen roles – which have done untold harm by glorifying repellent machismo and mindless thuggery – to be reinvented as women [Jodie Whitaker as Mrs Who, and Helen Mirren as Prospera, have shown this can be accomplished with stylish conviction]. But while the film industry continues to cast able-bodied actors as persons with disabilities, and uses straight actors to play gay characters, there is – mercifully – no logical reason why a man (namely me!) should not fulfil the feminists’ long-cherished dream of a Lady 007.

288 • Mental make-up

288 • Mental make-up

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The first time I slept with Max Factor
He claimed to be Virgo Intacta.
When I cried ‘This is mad!
Are you not my real dad?’
He said, ‘No, son, you’re only an actor.’

Folklore suggests that, in the movie business, it’s possible to sleep one’s way to the top; but this morning’s bogus instalment suggests that, in the make-up department at least, different rules apply. Here the Alpha Male swats aside the Young Pretender’s hopes, implanting in his mind an idea that would corrode anybody’s confidence. It would be interesting to know how this fictional conversation continued, on subsequent trysts. The catamite would be well advised to challenge his master with the riposte that We’re All Actors.

286 • A-listers

286 • A-listers

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Playing Aleister Crowley at chess,
The outcome is anyone’s guess:
Four bishops on fire
Queens a-quake with desire
Three kings in a state of undress …

For a few golden years the sex-crazed dope-fiend Crowley – born 145 years ago today – was dubbed, by the papers, ‘The Wickedest Man in the World‘. How ignominious, parochial, and inconsequential his Satanism and misogyny appear now, in a world where the barbarous leadership of serial liars and delusional psychopaths is glorified in headlines daily.

285 • Jordan

285 • Jordan

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There’s just one more applicant: Gordon,
Well-equipped for the post of church warden.
A total abstainer,
He’s drunk wine in Cana,
And once dipped his nose in the Jordan.

We’re in real danger, here, of seeing a thoroughly unsuitable candidate appointed to a responsible office, thanks to the shortsighted – or perhaps wittingly bogus – recommendations of a silver-tongued sponsor.

273 • All night I cry

273 • All night I cry

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I’ve not seen a sign of my spouse
Since she opted to live as a mouse.
All night I cry ‘Please
Don’t you fancy some cheese?
I’ve set trapsful all over the house.’

Can we lure back our spouses with nibbles? Or woo our lost partners with treats? Am I accidentally writing the start of a Music-Hall song? The answer to the first two questions is, regrettably, ‘no’ … not if the morsels in question are elements in a lurid murder plot. Don’t say it couldn’t happen. Do say, ‘How terribly British, to offer such a flippant take on such a desperate scenario.’

272 • The New Solomon

272 • The New Solomon

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The Nabob of New Nagasaki
Has painted his genitals khaki.
The grounds he supplied
Were ‘To stop my young bride
From bragging she’s slept with a darkie:
We hate all that racist malarkey.’

A companion piece to yesterday’s heartfelt parable, this bulletin depicts ‘a leader whose perception and compassion present a stark and humiliating contrast to the failings of Western potentates’. The sacrifice the Nabob makes – in order to negate a loathsome opinion, voiced in unacceptable language – reveals ‘a Zen-like clarity of action and a laudable commitment to non-confrontational protest’. Astute and deftly understated, part of his testament ‘deserve[s] to be carved deep into the façade of every Governmental HQ on the planet’, where many hope to see ‘bas-reliefs in granite, gigantic friezes and modish, gaudy frescoes commemorating the compact wit and crystalline sagacity of a latter-day Solomon’.

270 • Surplus to requirements

270 • Surplus to requirements

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A crafty old crook from Pamplona
Once posed as a cardiac donor.
The ad. for his heart
Said ‘Good second-hand part
Unused by its previous owner.’

‘Crafty’, perhaps, in that the familiar language of Classified Ads deftly deflects attention from the more problematical aspects of his offer. But ‘crook’, really? Where’s the crime in seeking to divest oneself of an organ that serves only as memento of a life untouched by true romance?

267 • Libra

267 • Libra

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They weighed you in Libra, the scales:
Now all your fine life-planning fails.
No matter what talents
You chuck in the balance
The world sucks the wind from your sails.

Waking this morning under the sign of the celestial scales, it’s liberating to remember how our lives are laid out in full by the time the midwife has us snipped and weighed. I was 9lbs 10 in my maiden diaper … heavy, man.

257 • Femme Fatale

257 • Femme Fatale

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Yet rather than cutting my hair
Delilah confided, ‘Beware!
By curtailing the length
I may limit your strength,
And you’ve little of either to spare.’

This morning’s reading from Judges 16 warned us about the guile of Philistine women, and about the likely aftermath of games that involve sexual partners in tying each other up. Our sermon, now, will develop that theme of the femme fatale, and seek to establish which option is – in the long term – more injurious to the male ego: (a) to be castrated outright, or (b) to be spared emasculation thanks to confidential hints that there’s not much down there worth lopping off?

253 • Currency crisis

253 • Currency crisis

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A shifty young slut from Sri Lanka
Had a senseless affair with a banker:
When she paid him for sex
She was forging blank cheques,
And he brought plastic flowers to thank her.

Of course we’re not out to shame this particular slut, nor to heap ignominy on that particular island: any affair with a banker is a priori senseless. Would that I were sufficiently familiar with international finance to understand how the interpersonal circumstances outlined above should conduce to the forging of cheques, let alone blank ones. Doubtless it’s one of the few downsides of commercial coition that are not widely discussed.

252 • Mud

252 • Mud

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There was an old man of Llandudno
Whose wife left him all of a sudden-o.
She’d chatted with Charlotte
The neighbourhood harlot.
His name was quite palpably mud, no?

Baleful and hideous, is it not, to see the conniving women of the parish ganging up on a well-nigh blameless man? Full disclosure: I have never wittingly visited Llandudno, and know nobody there trading under the name of ‘Charlotte’. Consequently the present bulletin cannot legitimately be supposed to bear any relevance to my recent history.

232 • Messina / Massena

232 • Messina / Massena

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“So I’ve flown all the way to Messina
To view this Exploding Hyæna,
And now ‘She won’t burst
Till the crowd has dispersed’?
No Sir! I stay here till I’ve seen her.”

Thanks to good ol’ coronavirus the era of self-centered, impetuous air-tourism is drawing to a close. This means more-breathable air all around the world. It also means that the hoodwinking of brainless Americans by shabby Sicilian mountebanks with their callous animal-exploiting sideshows will have to move closer to home: from Messina to Massena, in all probability.

224 • Apecraft (3)

224 • Apecraft (3)

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My quest for perfection began
When I first met a Renaissance Man
(Namely Fra Lippo Lippi,
Who held up our Chippy
Disguised as an orang-utan ).

Many an unrealisable life-trajectory has been determined by inappropriate fixation on the accomplishments of historical figures: frustration and self-loathing are the invariable consequences. In this brief confessional piece we are shown how ill-founded such hero-worship can be: if Lippi is skilled in all things, how come the ape-suit he relies upon – while fulfilling this gourmet heist – fails to conceal his identity?

197 • Where are they now?

197 • Where are they now?

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We’ve not seen a great deal of Piers;
He hasn’t come this way for years.
The reason he states
Is the size of the weights
That he’s tied to the hairs in his ears.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Layla.
She’s given her heart to a sailor.
She’s renting her spine
To a colleague of mine,
And the rest still remains with her gaoler.

We’ve not seen a great deal of Chalkie
Since he walked, on his hands, to Milwaukee
Where he teaches guitar
At The Conservatoire,
So he claims. But I guess that’s a porky.

A little suite of patterns or exemplars for those who need to craft excuses explaining why they no longer visit people they were friends with in High School (it’s too, too bourgeois, after all, to persist in blaming the Covid crisis for our insularity and self-absorption).

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

189 • Dr Campbell recollected

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Our Deputy Dean, Dr Campbell
Told us ‘God’s out to get those who gamble’.
Yet she died, in a bet,
Playing Russian Roulette
Which the School needed skill to unscramble.

This somewhat garish episode from childhood taught us more about adult hypocrisy than we could have learnt from any number of bookish fables or homilies. The school Governors reacted to a popular employee’s death by proclaiming a string of revisionist accusations … how she had ‘lied to the Board who appointed her’ … how her college degree had been ‘incorrectly specified’ … how dates of her previous employment ‘contained inaccuracies’. In short, parents could not blame the school for appointing such a dissolute daredevil to be their children’s moral guardian, because ‘Donna Campbell was not the person she purported to be.’ Well, which of us is? Even as a child I was mesmerised by the Establishment’s feeble catalogue of squirming, pedantic and ineffectual exculpations. Hats off, say I, to a memorable teacher, whose gift for non-verbal demonstration imparted such significant life-lessons.

186 • Potus Alert (6)

186 • Potus Alert (6)

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I’ll tell you what makes for good neighbours:
It’s not any wall-building labours.
It’s missiles piled high
Backed by spies in the sky
And ominous rattling of sabres.

It’s supposedly Independence Day back home, but tragically we are still living in chains, shackled to vindictive incompetence, risible, solipsistic ignorance, and benighted self-delusion.

173 • Cancer

173 • Cancer

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Is your zodiac character Cancer?
Is your fate a dark question? I’ll answer:
What the stars have in store
Will assist you no more
Than a Zimmer-frame aids a lap-dancer.

Waking under a strange sign in this very strange year, I’m just so glad that the clear-sighted astrologer, deftly unravelling the tangled threads of time, may still be relied upon to remove any worrying uncertainty from our lives.

167 • Deep Fake (2)

167 • Deep Fake (2)

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The last time I spoke to Bob Dylan
He asked me to spell ‘Enniskillen’.
I think it was him
Though he looked somewhat prim:
It might have been Harold MacMillan.

The real Dylan can be antagonistically oblique when subjected to unwanted attention, yet the facial demeanour reported here feels inauthentic. Arguably a stalker of celebrities, and an impersonator, are not far apart on the fanboy spectrum. In this piece we examine the predicament of the former, when confronted by a (probable) specimen of the latter.

165 • Fakin’ it

165 • Fakin’ it

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A fancy-dress party! Huzzah!
Yet the invite said ‘Come as you are.’
So I went as I was
Which was lucky, because
I was already dressed like a star.

The implication of this paradoxical summons is that we are perpetually in fancy dress … indeed, unless you design and make your own clothes, you’re always partly costumed as someone else. More unsettling, though, is the notion that anyone disguised as a star might wish to attend a gathering where everybody else knows they’re fakin’ it.

149 • The Florist’s Tale

149 • The Florist’s Tale

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‘It’s tragic,’ declared Robin Hood,
‘My public has misunderstood
Why I left Sherwood Forest
To work as a florist.
Fact is, I’m allergic to wood.’

As we contemplate the inn-signs of Merrie England, this ‘Hood’ is typically presented as some kind of macho archetype. Reading between the lines of his own account, however, suggests the erstwhile outlaw was none too comfortable in that role: in soliciting public compassion, he boldly goes against the grain.

148 • Meet the team (11)

148 • Meet the team (11)

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Our spin-doctor gushes hot air
As he swivels all day on his chair
Sometimes dazed, sometimes dizzy.
But since he looks busy
The managers seem not to care.

In a world that stands or falls by surface meanings, the appearance of industry – however compulsive and futile – evidently guarantees continued employment.

139 • Meet the team (7)

139 • Meet the team (7)

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Down there is our treasurer, Rafe,
Who begs on the street, like a waif.
It’s a strategy meant
To throw thieves off the scent
Of the keys to the company safe.

In the office environment, confidential ‘insights’ of this sort are often tests of the listener’s gullibility, or else veiled threats: ‘You could end up on the street too, if you don’t do a decent job’ (ie, play the corporate game. It’s just a question of figuring out some of the rules).

134 • Meet the team (5)

134 • Meet the team (5)

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Our company lawyer, Corinna,
Works out of a bedsit in Pinner.
Best not to ask why.
You’ll find out by and by.
Just don’t let her take you to dinner.

The workplace is pregnant with erotic foreboding and intimations of past scandal. ‘Dinner’ is identifiable as a euphemism … but for what, exactly? Some ropes are better left unshown.

129 • Meet the team (3)

129 • Meet the team (3)

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And this is your manager, Amy.
Her statements are all pretty samey:
Things like ‘Cover my back,’
And ‘I’m all right, Jack,’
And ‘Die if you ever betray me.’

The predictability of these proclamations is reassuring, even if the office culture they suggest runs counter to civilised expectation.

128 • Agent provocateur

128 • Agent provocateur

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My aunt, up in Appleby Parva,
Has woven a black balaclava:
Defying the veto
She roves, incognito,
Provoking all kinds of palaver.

Incredible though this bulletin may appear, my adopted country genuinely boasts a hamlet named Appleby Parva, rural, remote and right-leaning. Since the time of Lady Godiva, any kind of outgoing behaviour there is received as a scandal, so 2020’s Covid Lockdown is a boon to most residents. My British aunt, however, has the measure of her neighbours and takes a geriatric delight in courting opprobrium.

127 • Meet the Team (2)

127 • Meet the Team (2)

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Your opposite number here, Jake,
Has never once made a mistake.
Just you copy him
And the chances are slim
That he’ll ever work out you’re a fake.

The quest for personal authenticity never did run smooth. To avoid being called out as a fake, behave like a fake. Furthermore, however you choose to play it, someone will be judging you.

124 • Missouri position

124 • Missouri position

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Though His sea-walking record still stands
Christ’s rivals haunt various lands:
The Bishop of Newry
Has crossed the Missouri
Not once, but three times … on his hands.

Of course there are those who regard the original miracle as a piece of trickery, one that crossed the shaman/showman boundary. It’s nonetheless dispiriting to read of high officials in the Church – however skilled in circus-craft – setting out to upstage the Nazarene in so meretricious a fashion.

120 • Humming-bird

120 • Humming-bird

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I’m beginning my decade-long task
To remain in this humming-bird mask.
As to how I’ll get by
When I can’t even fly
Most folk are too frightened to ask.

The shaman is able to escape humanity – its ailments and anguish – by trance experiences of other species’ lives. The next-best thing, for us regular types, is a mask of some sort. Don’t let the crowd’s pusillanimous gawping unsettle you or cause you to question – for a single moment – the purpose, efficacy, or duration of your chosen path.

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

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As I swung – in my skimpiest Speedos
And the loudest of lime-green tuxedos
From the high diving-board –
Some buffoon cut the cord
(This has happened in several Lidos).

For the committed exhibitionist – a burgeoning breed in our benighted times – no stunt is off-limits. The lifeguard above, intervening to frustrate an ill-judged April 1 prank, is surely not the prime ‘buffoon’. (And if outraged libertarians cite Shakespeare’s King Lear – Act IV, where the suicidal Duke of Gloucester asks ‘Is wretchedness deprived that benefit / To end itself by death?‘ – I shall refute them thus: the Duke, at least, is not play-acting.)

070 • Grasshopper

070 • Grasshopper

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A grasshopper went in the closet
And left an unwholesome deposit
Then sued the hotel
On account of the smell.
That wasn’t quite cricket, now, was it?

‘There’s nothing in your Verse Marathon that’s suitable for reading to little children,’ writes one reader. True, and I didn’t intend to imply that there would be. This morning, however, a tale of an anthropomorphic insect, in a lightweight tone suitable for any age-group.

069 • Laddish bragging

069 • Laddish bragging

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‘I went to a marvellous party:
And shagged this cute goddess, Astarte,
In front and behind,
Then got my dick signed
By most of The Illuminati.’

Pretty much as I heard it on the train, though with a few details changed to make it rhyme better. Testosterone talking, but his fellow travelers took it for gospel. Had to feel sorry that he’d swallowed those role-players’ stories. At least he managed to quote Noël Coward correctly. [This one is for my correspondent and critic, Ura]

067 • Empty Shelves

067 • Empty Shelves

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Slim pickings … the neighbours are dying …
I’ve left it quite late … panic-buying …
Found five plastic forks …
And this small bag of corks …
But nothing you’d call ‘death-defying’ …

Corona Virus is a gift to the right-wing media that elected the present UK government; amid their craftily-orchestrated furore of hand-washing and panic-buying, who has headspace to worry about the vicious incompetence of Our Leaders? Nobody sane believes that Shopping will Save the Day … but who has the courage not to stock up on indispensibles, ‘just in case’?

064 • Sabrina

064 • Sabrina

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She told us her name was Sabrina.
It seemed a bit posh for a cleaner.
She swept the back room
With a Burberry broom,
But we just didn’t like her demeanour.

The lackey whom your innate class prejudice caused you to spurn was not necessarily posh. She’d adopted a classy name, and purchased a high-end accessory, in hopes of impressing those hoity-toity enough to advertise for a cleaner.

063 • Slippery

063 • Slippery

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A devious dunce in Dumfries
Liked to baste his whole body with grease.
‘It helps me relax
And squeeze into cracks,’
He advised the admiring police.

Not such a dunce, perhaps, since he shares our Leaders’ modus operandi: openly declare your corrupt ways, and the Establishment will be duped into applauding your principled frankness.

062 • Forever young?

062 • Forever young?

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They flock to the talks he keeps staging,
That serial killer from Beijing:
Each final recital
Beguiles with its title,
‘Straightforward Prevention of Ageing’.

Of course there are psychopaths – and not solely in the Orient – who prey on the fears of the elderly; but far more culpable, surely, are the youth-glorifying capitalists whose adverts nourish such insecurities.

058 • The new tobacco

058 • The new tobacco

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The roll-out of 5G’s complete!
Humanity’s stupidest feat!
For most of my life I
Have hidden from Wi-Fi
But now it pollutes every street.

Smoking, the cool trend of a previous generation, is now proven lethal. Likewise this shiny communications technology, foisted on us by profiteering corporations, will probably show its true hand in years to come.

047 • Entrapment

047 • Entrapment

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When summoned to meet the new vicar,
I took him two bottles of liquor:
With a villainous oath
He decanted them both
Saying ‘Bet I can swallow mine quicker.’

We may well ponder the nature of this ‘summons’; less obscure is the motive of the summonee, who exploits the churchman’s weakness by taking the role of tempter. Which, then, is the more culpable party?

043 • Infiltrator (4)

043 • Infiltrator (4)

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Before I arrived in this county
I hoodwinked a gullible Mountie:
‘You steal on the sly,
I turn a blind eye,
We share ten percent of the bounty.’

We’ve met this conniving character before. The remainder of the ‘bounty’ will presumably be salted away in some Offshore Fund. [See also here]

042 • Gravel

042 • Gravel

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A popular pundit named Pavel
Likes to garnish his goulash with gravel:
‘It’s not merely greed
It’s the roughage I need
And without it my guts would unravel.’

The media manipulates its gullible public into a state of dietary insecurity, which is then fed by the fads of witless ‘influencers’.

035 • Westminster

035 • Westminster

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No wonder this country feels callous,
While its Parliament plots in a ‘Palace’.
If you’re democrats, meet
On some ornery street
Where the air isn’t dripping with malice.

So I rail against my adoptive country? I rail against my home country too.

033 • Pet shop

033 • Pet shop

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We know you were keen on a chimp
But the one in the shop had a limp.
This won’t be the same
But at least it’s not lame:
So let’s think of a name for your shrimp.

The trusting child dreams of an ideal birthday present, liberating, life-enhancing and dynamic. But, come the glorious day, the shameless parents make excuses and deliver something underweight, slimy and unfit for purpose. Sounds familiar, no?

031 • Infiltrator (3)

031 • Infiltrator (3)

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Before I arrived in this town
I traded my clothes with a clown.
Written off as a berk,
I may openly work
To turn the whole world upside down.

For the day my adopted country throws out the baby with the bathwater. The guile of the demagogue matching the gullibility of the person in the street. [Related story]

028 • Pandemonium

028 • Pandemonium

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First medics deliver my jab
From the Pandemic Antidotes Lab.
And then they forecast a
Full global disaster:
‘The whole world a mortuary slab’.

Our behaviour is entirely contradictory, but you’ve come to us because we’re experts, and we know our paradoxical behaviour will only strengthen the illusion of authority we take pains to foster.