Deities Archives • My Dog Errol

359 • My kingdom …

24th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As kids, on the farm in Atlanta
We’d leave strict instructions for Santa:
‘One horse in each stocking
For riding, not rocking,
Their minimum speed set to “canter”.’

It seems that, all things being equal
This story would merit a sequel
The which I shall try,
In due course, to supply:
At present, I’m stumped by the prequel.

One is never too young to begin coveting the unattainable. Readers will readily guess the upshot and, I trust, excuse any inability to pinpoint the root of this parlous state of affairs.

348 • Carnality, spirituality

13th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You claim that your abs and your pecs
Will dazzle the opposite sex?
I tell you my quads
Have bewildered the Gods
And reduced them to gibbering wrecks.

This is the question for all us body-builders, is it not, whether ’tis nobler to pump up one’s corpse grotesquely in hope that impressionable young women will fancy being steamrollered by one’s unseemly bulk, or whether to treat the said corpse as some kind of overblown temple wherein the majesty of the Divine may be both parodied and repudiated.

327 • My brother’s keeper

22nd November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Cain! Where’s thy brother?” “Who, Abel?
I tell you, that kid is unstable.
One day I’m ‘his keeper’
The next, ‘the Grim Reaper’.
I’m not sure I like either label.”

We do not require a Diploma in Psychiatry to identify the truly unstable party in this story, projecting, on to his younger brother, his own mental conflict. Nor do we need reminding that, when the Almighty next asked the same question, Cain had resolved that inner crisis, somewhat messily. Note that Cain did not destroy his other brother, Seth, nor their sisters Luluwa and Delbora. Are these siblings, therefore, all passive accomplices in the First Fratricide, inasmuch as they never exacted revenge on Cain? Or were they simply pipped to the post, when the assassin’s house fell down on his head?

320 • The Apple

15th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

293 • Nefertiti

19th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I flew my cartoon autogyro
To draw Nefertiti in Cairo:
What a look of surprise
When I dotted her *i*s
And crossed both her *t*s with my biro!

It was Tintin, I believe, who introduced my younger self to the possibilities of the autogyro; likewise his creator, Hergé, sparked my lifelong interest in drawing. The summons from a Pharaoh was a pleasant, if predictable, consequence of these twin influences (Akhnaten was gracious enough to approve of the woman I drew for him, and subsequently married her).

282 • Discharge

8th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

“This golden-haired Man in the Moon,
This fat-headed, pus-filled balloon,
This bag of black bile
Laced with venomous guile:
His discharge can not come too soon.”

Adapted from last night’s two-hour call with my one-time class-mate back home. No idea who or what he was ranting about … I just enjoyed hearing his rage … hardly needed a phone … [thanks bigly, Hooch]

236 • Virgo

23rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

You may trust, under Virgo the Virgin,
That your boons and your blessings will burgeon:
But such hopes are misplaced
(Like a frog in fishpaste
Or a goat in the garb of a surgeon).

My mother had a fair-sized bee in her bonnet when it came to Mariolatry. Sooner trust an astrologer than a woman, she would often say. For a long while I was blind to the paradox in those words, but recent events in my private life, which I shall not make public here, are forcing me to re-evaluate them.

231 • Exterminate!

18th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The Dalek invaders from Skaro
Have colonised Kilimanjaro.
Some say Moriarty
Is leading their party
And plans to exterminate Poirot.

The archetypal figures of modern myth, heroic or villainous, are of course made in our own image, just as their classical antecedents were. Here an African mountain is their Parnassus, from which they observe humanity’s self-destruction; and, as if on stage for our delectation, re-enact it in robotically brutal parody.

229 • Pura tontería, pura sabiduría

16th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The night we gunned down an intruder
He proved to be Pablo Neruda.
Here’s hoping the burglar
We’ve hanged in the pergola
Wasn’t The Lion of Judah.

Constitutionally one is permitted to defend one’s patch, but too often this right is taken by householders as a license to exterminate any foreign or outlandish figure who approaches or penetrates our homesteads. In this morning’s sermon we remember all the great minds and shining role-models, the poets and Aslan-substitutes, who have been swept away in such episodes of indiscriminate violence.

178 • Ms Nicholls recollected

26th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When our Primary teacher, Ms Nicholls
Equipped us with scythes and with sickles
We skipped down the street
Swiping folk off their feet.
She did get us into such pickles!

In a lesson about the Grim Reaper, when I was probably about 7 years old, our teacher brought in her academical robe and some gardening tools, and we took turns to dress up as Death. I owe that school a lot, and return to it often in dreaming. Ms Nicholls seems to have moved on, however.

177 • Postcard (2)

25th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My card to the poet John Dryden
Asked, ‘What of the sea-god, Poseidon?’
‘A bit of a nonce,’
Was his simple response
(I got the same answer from Haydn).

Dryden, ‘Glorious John’, died some 320 years ago, yet this does not preclude his responding, in dreams, to a postcard from a fan. More remarkable, perhaps, is that Haydn – whose earthly life did not overlap at all with Dryden’s – should turn out to echo the latter’s downbeat assessment of a celebrity nymph-molester. [See also here]

176 • Medusa

24th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

That ugly, snake-headed Medusa
Whom painters depict as a loser
Was once wise and fair
(And had regular hair)
Till Poseidon turned up to abuse her.

Legend tells how wily he-man Perseus slew the snaky-haired she-monster, reflecting her petrifying gaze back in her own eyes by using a mirror, the ironically-selected symbol of feminine vanity. Yet the neglected prequel is a viciously contemporary catalogue of power-seduction and slut-shaming. #MeToo indeed.

124 • Missouri position

3rd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

099 • Tea on the Lea

8th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

When Gandhi set sail on the Lea
And fancied some tadpoles for tea
The beadle of Broxbourne
Brought five pints of frogspawn
And charged but one single rupee.

Jesus’s supposed UK excursion is celebrated in song all over Britain (‘And did those feet‘ etc); whereas Gandhi’s teatime outing on a relatively-obscure Thames tributary is commemorated only in this five-line fragment. Likewise the generosity of Hertfordshire officialdom.

089 • Saint Lawrence

29th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On his water-skis, down the St Lawrence,
Hurtled John, the Archbishop of Florence;
First his wires became crossed,
Then his halo got lost.
Soon he gave himself up to the torrents.

Factually this new river-piece may seem problematic, fraught as it is with lies and nonsense. Symbolically, however, we find The Baptist succumbing to the immersion on which his fame rested, and note in passing how the foolhardy loss of any churchman’s reputation (cf the halo, above) habitually presages self-extinction.

082 • Saviours

22nd March 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Did you read, on some scrap of papyrus,
How Christ raised the daughter of Jairus?
No dark Dead Sea Scrolls
But soft white paper rolls
For our conquest of Coronavirus.

Admittedly there were no New Testament books among the genuine Dead Sea Scrolls, though with the more recently-discovered fakes anything goes. But whereas those scrolls record the superstitious beliefs of a sect 22 centuries ago, 2020’s rational response to mortal disease is spelt out in the barren superflux of hoarded lavatory-paper.

069 • Laddish bragging

9th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘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]

023 • Crockery

23rd January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

We dined on five loaves and two fishes.
Each slice was quite thin, but delicious.
Seeing Christ and his mates
Had brought five thousand plates,
We stayed on to help do the dishes.

Such a lot of administrative/background work goes unnoticed, its practitioners unacknowledged. It would be nice to see behaviour like the above become the norm again.

020 • Antichrist alert

20th January 2020 RL Comments 9 Comments

The Antichrist got on our bus.
He didn’t cause much of a fuss.
No sulphurous whiff,
No tusk in his quiff.
But somehow, not quite one of us.

Thing is, how do we know it was The Antichrist at all? And why does Otherness have to be such a bugbear?