Criminal Archives • My Dog Errol

361 • Pandora’s Boxing Day

26th December 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

‘These microbes must stay in the flask!’
You begged to be given the task.
But it snowed, and you slipped
Down the steps to the crypt.
‘Will superglue mend it?’ you ask …

When tremors were rocking Qatar
My genie got out of the jar
When I bade him return
And repair his cracked urn
His answer was, ‘Ha bloody ha.’

‘Twas the day after Christmas … and we suddenly had time to try a little remembrance of things past. Back when we all assumed the pandemic was a gambit in the column-inches war. Back when we imagined rogue science might be to blame. Back when the spirit world was obviously exacting vengeance on an iniquitous civilization. But now we know better … if we do … will we predict, prepare, react better? Or have the Genies truly left the building, leaving their self-styled ‘masters’ holding the bottle (that’s ‘fiasco’ in Italian, of course) and counting the cracks?

350 • Dionysus

15th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A merry young minstrel from Kent
Made music wherever he went,
Smashing bottles in bars,
Hurling hammers at cars,
To an almost obsessive extent.

There’s a little bit of Dionysus in each of us, and there’s no harm in giving it free rein now and then, especially at the end of a cruel year in which the performing arts have ebbed almost to extinction. It’s only the word ‘obsessive’ that gives us pause in the bulletin above. Nobody likes a maniac.

349 • Take-away (4)

14th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

347 • Take-away (3)

12th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

It seems that the culprit was Carla,
Who cleaned up the funeral parlor;
Or was it Luigi,
Who wielded the squeegee
Backstage in Milan at La Scala?
NOW BRING ME A CHANA MASSALA.

If today’s bulletin is some kind of post-mortem report, it will strike most sensible readers as annoyingly non-committal. What is certain, however, is that an habitual devourer of carry-out meals runs an enhanced risk of succumbing to food-poisoning; so we should perhaps be more grateful to the Carlas and Luigis of this world, who busy themselves with janitorial hygiene that benefits each and every one of us.

342 • Hard to believe

7th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

5th December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.)

338 • Assassin (2)

3rd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The one time I served Jack the Ripper
He’d come in my shop for a kipper.
With his dagger and cloak
He seemed quite a good bloke
Till he slew a small poodle named Pippa.

Society encourages us to think badly of a serial killer, yet one recognises this shop-girl’s guilty admiration for her celebrity customer, flaunting the characteristic costume of his profession. Here Jack’s conduct, while admittedly uncivilised, is readily rationalised, inasmuch as any domesticated dog – especially the scion of so ornamental and unnatural a breed – is already Dead to Nature. Had the fish emporium chosen to host a free-range, genetically unmodified cur, the self-styled ‘Ripper’ – like any common-or-garden customer – would doubtless have been torn to pieces a good while before the completion of his intended purchase. But it’s easy to be wise after the event.

337 • Assassin

2nd December 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

So I’m off, on this evening’s vendetta
(Check pistol, check map, check Lambretta).
I’ll be sure to disclose
When your name’s one of those
On my list, if that makes you feel better.

It’s not easy to imagine the feelings of a parent who finds out that his or her offspring has become a terrorist or Mafioso/Mafiosa. But it’s encouraging, in the bulletin above, to note at least one hitperson’s solicitude for an anxious ancestor. Let’s hope this is not an unique case.

330 • Serial Killer

25th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Gents! Should you require an abortion,
Step into my clinic with caution.
Here tools are corroded,
Procedures outmoded,
And fees tantamount to extortion.

Surely a man has little to fear from a backstreet abortionist, especially one so unsparing in his own condemnation? Yet the very existence of such a clinic throws grave shadows on the integrity of the male of the species, who is very rarely the target of the hazardous procedure for which he is about to pay.

326 • Sagittarius

21st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I’m sorry to say, Sagittarius,
Your outlook’s still far from hilarious:
They’ll shoot holes in your hat
Or else puncture your cat,
Those nasty new neighbours nefarious.

Waking today under the zodiacal influence of the archer, how can one doubt that it’s solely the astrologer who has the insight to guide us through troubled times: inspired by the crossbow on high, his or her aim is true.

324 • Monserrate

19th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In the mountains beyond Bogota
Five gangsters had opened a spa.
I went once or twice
But it wasn’t that nice:
It needed more je ne sais quoi.

They’d been loading some drugs on a mule
When it panicked and fell in the pool.
Soon that afternoon’s dip
Was a ten-hour trip
And the place seemed a lot less uncool.

To those who protest that ‘drugs mule’ is nowadays a mere metaphor for a human trafficker, I can only counter with the evidence in the bulletin above. The narrator’s first-hand testimony seems incontestable, and critics who urge the contrary are merely drawing attention to their innate misogyny, or a groundless predisposition to doubt the objectivity of individuals who delight in regaling us with accounts of their psychedelic experiences.

311 • Liar, Liar

6th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

“Do tell! What became of that lout
Whose lies you once bandied about?
Did he close down your cult?
Or become an adult?”
“Nah. The fire in his pants fizzled out.”

Overheard this time next year, in the Smithsonian: a former Democrat and an erstwhile Republican chatting as they admire a wittily elegant ‘Tactical Chaos’ exhibit from 2020 [it’s a cloisonné enamel pin, in gold-plated brass, on which portly presidential ‘pants on fire’ are presented with little shifty eyes and a comical golden quiff … I got mine here].

310 • Loser!

5th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘I hear fireworks, and popping of corks,
I hear doves running rings around hawks;
I hear jubilant cries
At a Loser’s demise,’
Said the ghost of a grinning Guy Fawkes.

Guy Fawkes is popularly reviled for lack of success in his ambition to blow up the English Parliament on this day in 1605; as a damp squib, therefore, he’s well-placed to pour derision on other thwarted politicos. Every year, in the UK, his effigy is burnt in celebration on 5 November, and this will surely continue until an even more laughable failed wannabe comes to the public’s attention.

308 • A Sensible Choice?

3rd November 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

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.

305 • Perpetraitor

31st October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Please note that your acolyte, Artie,
Is banned from our after-show party.
Act II of MacBeth
Does not call for the death
Of King Duncan by so-called ‘karate’.

Geez, Shakespeare was a dude that knew a whole lot about the darkness that can swamp a whole realm after a gracious, humane, temperate ruler gets ousted by a card-carrying psychopath. But his Scottish Play holds comfort for us all: though there was no shortage of countrymen with the means and the motive to cut him down, the tyrannical megalomaniac was eventually unseated by his own delusional self-belief.

292 • Gnasher

18th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

The last time I met Tarantino
I was screening my ‘short’ at Das Kino
About Dennis the Menace’s
Parthenogenesis
Back in the days of Das Beano.

That ‘short’ was the only motion picture I ever finished (and it had only one screening) but there’s enough on the cutting-room floor to make a couple nice ‘longs’ if I ever get the time. The commemorative poem came along at least fifteen years later, a tardy response to Quentin who – with characteristically brusque erudition – had challenged me to write a metrically-perfect advert for the movie, in this form, in which one line contained but a single word. Of course Shakespeare did it better (‘Never, never, never, never, never’) but that’s too bleak a message for Sunday, when we should all rightly be devoting our meditations to Miraculous Births and their Consequences.

291 • Implants

17th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In LA, a lass named Ludmilla
Got grabbed by a giant gorilla
That bit off her head
And left her for dead
Stripped naked and strapped to a pillar

At which point a serial killer
Embalmed her in pink Polyfilla
While her carcase was whipped …
(I’m just quoting the script:
She’s been cast in a low-budget thriller).

For decades Hollywood has thriven on demeaning women, both off and on the screen. Ludmilla may seem crazy to audition for this clichéd pile of crap, but a girl has to live, no? Mind you, she could have stayed back East on daddy’s farm, dignity intact, and lived a happy and fulfilled life milking lamas, shearing wildebeests and marrying her childhood sweetheart, Sergei. But that’s not the dream our tainted Western culture implanted in her unhappy head, is it?

283 • Gyratory care

9th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The upside-down baby of Bath
Liked to stand on his head in the hearth.
Once an hour he was turned
To ensure nothing burned.
The corpse was interred at Penarth.

Bath and Penarth lying some sixty miles apart, and in different countries, the reported choice of burial-ground seems inexplicably remote: casual readers of this brief life may suspect foul play. Note, however, that the age-at-death of the subject is not stated. We cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility that – thanks to the careful rotary management described – this obstinate individual was not roasted in infancy as first appears, but rather lived to a ripe old age, perhaps being buried in Glamorganshire after serving as a wise yet eccentric pastor until the age of (let’s say) 77. Very possibly his personal charisma was such that parishioners learnt to stand on their heads as well, the better to commune with him: after all, spiritual truths are best imparted eye-to-eye.

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]

281 • Incompetence

7th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Please note: your chiropodist, Pete,
Will be shot, should he enter our street.
He made such a botch
Of repairing your watch
He sha’n’t get his hands on my feet.

It’s all-too easy to suspect across-the-board incompetence when, in fact, ineptitude has been proven in one field only. The luckless ‘Pete’ here may indeed be a jackass-of-all-trades, but what would become of US society if we took pot-shots at every bungling nincompoop who came to our attention?

279 • Ax me another

5th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

This ax I acquired near Mauritius,
A purchase both proud and propitious:
One night in the smog
It destroyed a small dog
That might have grown up to be vicious.

Here we are again with a canine spin on the timeless, and deeply tedious, sophomoric conscience-tickler, “If you could travel back to 1946, would you destroy ‘The Donald‘ as he lay puking in his gold-plated crib?” To which the only moral answer must be, “Let us set sail for ‘near Mauritius’ immediately, and acquire a job lot of these proud and propitious axes.”

273 • All night I cry

29th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.’

270 • Surplus to requirements

26th September 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

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?

262 • Idols of clay

18th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Let us live by the anarchists’ credo:
First steal a huge barrel of Playdoh
Then fashion a golem
That looks like Mo Mowlam
To drag through the streets of Laredo.

She’d have been 71 today, Mo Mowlam, had she not died so young. The above bulletin proposes a straightforward method for reviving the plain-talking British MP who, while serving in the Shadow Cabinet, urged the destruction of Buckingham Palace. It’s now the USA that stands in desperate need of such a firebrand radical, and that’s (partly) why today’s lesson in Thaumogenesis is set in a city divided by Trump’s imaginary Mexican wall, a comic symbol of his brainless posturing, and a heartening portent of his imminent demolition.

253 • Currency crisis

9th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

247 • Julie noted

3rd September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

What a jolt, to be jilted by Julie,
An upstart, a pipsqueak, a schoolie!
I am not ‘old and weird
With dead gnats in my beard’
And my pants do not reek of patchouli.

So it’s back to school for the young, and back to the drawing board for others (their elders and betters, by most accounts). You don’t see Daniel Craig getting rejected by Léa Seydoux, do you? Or if you do – I don’t think I’ve seen that film – she surely doesn’t insult him in such vague and unimaginative terms.

233 • Escapology

20th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

What joy to live out in the park,
And skulk in the bushes till dark!
Then catch cocker spaniels
To fry in Jack Daniel’s,
And start forest fires with one spark!

The Pastoral Impulse has a long and healthy history, but this outlaw’s short-sighted manifesto merely catalogues the reckless and ignoble impulses of a vainglorious deviant from whom any genuine Noble Savage would recoil with contempt.

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.

226 • Howzat!

13th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My son hurled a gobbet of Gouda
At a git riding high in a howdah
Who then toppled down dead,
While the elephant fled.
As a parent, I’ve never felt prouder.

Though many will admire this laudable initiative – and the consequent emancipation of an enslaved animal – others may simply be disgusted at the waste of good cheese. (Still others may suspect that the proud father has embellished the facts, in the interests of procuring an unexpected rhyme; and that his offspring’s actual feat was nothing more remarkable than lobbing a brick at a git on a bike.)

224 • Apecraft (3)

11th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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?

222 • Apecraft

9th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I read in The Military Journal,
An ape’s reached the rank of full colonel.
Since beasts lack a soul
He can act out the rôle
Without fearing Hellfire eternal.

We’ve grown accustomed to press scaremongering concerning military robots, which pictures Artificial Intelligence running berserk on battlefields of the future. Far more alarming, however, are reports that our Masters of War have already appointed creatures – without conscience, yet close to us in tactical reasoning – to execute their damnable machinations. Has humanity learnt nothing at all from the PG Tips scandal of the 1970s?

218 • Escalator

5th August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

In order to settle a score
I nailed a dead rat to your door.
Then you glued a grilled stoat
To my second-best coat.
So I’m bursting this slug on your floor …

Animals are often invoked in interpersonal abuse (‘You pig!’ ‘You bitch!’ and so on), but in this bulletin they cruelly serve as bodily sacrifices in what should be a war of words only. And, far from settling the score, their use appears to be ‘upping the ante’, as each participant glories in ever-more savage and ostentatious gestures. Such is humanity’s impercipient appetite for escalation.

216 • Carruthers

3rd August 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was baiting a bear named Carruthers
At a church of the Carmelite Brothers.
I’m ferociously strong
So he didn’t last long,
But I guess they have plenty of others.

Musculature and morale falter infallibly in captive animals: it’s not the strength of the vainglorious aggressor we marvel at here, but the weakness of his victim. Monks may be ‘known for their unpleasant habits’, as the old joke goes: but should we perhaps applaud this compassionate Brotherhood for allowing its bears to be slain outright? Worldlier bear-baiting gangs are obliged, by commercial imperative, to keep their victims alive, to suffer – for our delight – day after day.

199 • Brazil

17th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A caustic young clerk from Brazil
Chose the tools of his trade with great skill:
‘A poison-pen letter
Turns out so much better
When using a porcupine quill.’

It’s tempting to turn a kinder eye on an infamous trade when the practitioner follows it with subtle artistry. But would you admire an assassin, in the instant before he or she lunged forward to splinter your skull, for selecting a top-of-the-range sledge-hammer?

198 • Pillow talk

16th July 2020 RL Comments 1 Comment

I was giving myself CPR
While two gunslingers trashed my guitar.
Yet, perverse as it seems,
I’d give forty such dreams
For the way that things actually are.

At first glance, this verbatim account suggests the heart-stopping hold any delicate possession exerts on us. At second glance, it appears impenetrably stupid. Yet, as an afterthought, perhaps we should ponder the worries and woes of waking life, and deplore the feverish parodies of it that are discharged by a toxic subconscious as we reluctantly escape from sleep.

180 • Ms Purvis recollected

28th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Primary teacher, Ms Purvis,
Enlivened a boring church service
By lighting a fuse
That ran under the pews,
And made some of the parents quite nervous.

Ms Purvis was another amiable maverick on our school staff, and this had been one of her more famous Founder’s Day pranks. Of course we urged her to repeat the escapade, but I guess she’d gotten a major rap before, so it had to remain a story.

179 • Blight on Blight

27th June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I have only two problems with ‘Noddy’,
The plots and the writing (both shoddy).
If only Ms Blyton
Had worked with the light on
(Or simply been flung in a wadi).

These lines paraphrase my earliest memory of literary criticism. Ms Nicholls’s passion was commendable, her logic less so. A wadi-flinging before 1922, when Blyton published her first title, might have seemed arbitrary and over-harsh. Yet once she’d made it into print, the damage was irreversible – the smug racism, compulsive sexism and wooden stereotyping were out there, a viral formula spreading relentlessly from mind to mind to mind, yea, even unto the third and fourth generation.

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]

174 • The Crabmonger

22nd June 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Is anyone else fond of crabs?
I’ve 69 here, up for grabs:
The mother’s no beaut
But her grand-kids are cute.
They’d make a nice change from kebabs.

I have doubtless inveighed before, in this Verse Marathon, against the keeping of animals as pets. Who can remain dry-eyed on apprehending the uncertain status of these crustaceans, offered up by the crabmonger as a foodstuff, even after their family background, and personal charm, have been so heart-warmingly attested.

170 • Deep Fake (5)

18th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The day I joined Phi Beta Kappa
I was kicked down the stairs by Frank Zappa;
I think it was him
Though he’d been to the gym
And was looking uncommonly dapper.

Here our unfortunate narrator is subjected to a cruel assault, on a day that should have been notable for quite different reasons. The wounded ego is naturally keen to recast the humiliation as an encounter with a musical idol, yet the fantasy it supplies casts the object of his veneration in an unsavoury – and wholly improbable – light.

163 • N.I.L.A.D.

11th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was spoon-feeding Zsa Zsa Gabor
Till she held up her bowl and said ‘More’.
Sadly ‘Oliver Twist’
Tops the very long list
Of Novels I Loathe and Deplore.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion in literary matters, though ideally it will be accompanied by an explanation, when so forcefully expressed. Our narrator may be scandalised by the anti-Semitism many claim to detect in Dickens’s story; but does that provocation truly justify leaving a femme fatale (albeit a superannuated one) to starve?

158 • Manila

6th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our holiday let in Manila
Was owned by a serial killer:
I can still visualise
How his victims – all flies –
Lay vanquished all over the villa.

At this time of year enforced quarantine, or voluntary isolation, inevitably brings up memories of holidays gone by, often polluting them with intimations of mortality. The tininess, as well as the profusion, of the assassinees is deeply shocking.

155 • Meet the team (14)

3rd June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Don’t squeal, when you first come across
The corpse in the cupboard (our boss –
His wife’s an embalmer).
He died of bad karma,
A sad, but not serious, loss.

The progress of many an institution is hampered by the veneration employees persist in according to the charismatic figureheads of a former imperium. Here, characteristically, a dead boss has not been replaced: his ‘loss’ is judged non-serious, provided his mortal remnant is retained at the premises.

149 • The Florist’s Tale

28th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘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.

146 • Meet the team (10)

25th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That nurse with the knife is Nanette
Whose brief is our burgeoning debt.
She can cut it by half
If she slashes the staff
But you mustn’t take that as a threat.

The presence of trained medical personnel in the workplace would, in an ideal world, be reassuring. But, trained for what? The idea that my new colleagues and I might be culled, in the name of economies, is somewhat less so.

145 • Excuses

24th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I lifted the side of the lorry
Twelve pigs tumbled into the quarry.
Thus the law they call ‘Sod’s’
Caused an outcome at odds
With the one I’d been hoping for. Sorry.

An apology ought generally to be accepted in good faith, but perhaps not when the speaker seeks to blame some external ‘law’ for his or her personal blunder. The Bible speaks of demonic possession in falling swine, of course: this might have made for a more winning excuse, though that story’s Animal Rights credentials are pretty flimsy too.

143 • Meet the team (9)

22nd May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

On that bench lies our governor, Maud,
Who formerly sat on The Board.
In the financial crash
She lost most of our cash:
Disgrace was her only reward.

With characteristic chauvinism it’s a woman the company blames, and shames, for market losses which (as they implicitly acknowledge) afflicted the great majority of businesses in the sector. One is surprised they haven’t feminised her job-description to ‘Governess’.

141 • Meet the team (8)

20th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Your trainer’s Monsignor Arturo,
The curse of the Currency Bureau.
His fraudulent dealing
Has gone through the ceiling
And trebled the price of the Euro.

Reformed drug-users make the best addiction counsellors, just as burglars, having served time in jail, often prosper as security consultants. We might surmise from his title that Arturo, above, is a former inmate of the Vatican, and perhaps feel heartened that his skills – if such they be – have latterly found favour in a commercial milieu.

139 • Meet the team (7)

18th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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).

137 • Blair / Astaire

16th May 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A delicate dancer from Ware
Explains why she killed Fred Astaire:
‘A quiet inner voice
Said I hadn’t a choice:
It was him, or else Lionel Blair.’

Archetypally spineless strategy, to blame one’s crime on contradictory supernatural promptings. But is it a crime, or rather laudable atavism, to destroy alpha practitioners, thereby clearing the path to pre-eminence in one’s chosen field?

133 • Potus alert (5)

12th May 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Was ever a leader alive
More ripe for his P45
Than the 45th Potus?
So who are these voters
Who want his regime to survive?

‘P45’ means different things in different territories; back home, it’s that contemptible clown in the White House; here in Britain it’s a ‘pink slip’ document you receive from your employer when your contract terminates. The rhyme above, on the occasion of the Nebraska Primaries, optimistically brings the two meanings together in a transAtlantic alliance.

107 • Seine

16th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

I was raiding a wreck in the Seine,
Just me and two badly-dressed men.
They began to perspire
And my snorkel caught fire:
I’m not going to risk it again.

Arguably today’s adventurers fall somewhat short of the swashbuckling bravado that distinguished our childhood heroes. Alas, that we were so easily duped, from the cradle.

098 • Once Bonnie

7th April 2020 RL Comments 4 Comments

So – why do our mem’ries replay
That film-clip of beauteous decay
In which Clyde, once a sweetie
Becomes less up-Beatty
And Bonnie is Fadun’ Away?

Puns feel inexcusably trite; yet the arch wordplay here seeks to point up cinema’s pollutive complicity in our culture’s collective angst. When The New Hollywood temporarily massacres charismatic stars, its consumers become the life-long victims, haunted and taunted by unshiftable visions of desperate beauty defaced.

094 • ‘Grand National’

3rd April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The steeplechase season is nigh:
Watch dozens of thoroughbreds die!
Broken leg, broken back,
Put to death by the track.
Let the owners be shot too, say I.

What are these wretched creatures good for? High-status playthings for the rich, exciters of adrenaline for greedy gamblers, disposable victims of capitalism? ‘Grand National’, indeed: what kind of Nation judges their creation, and exploitation, ‘Grand’? Anyway, it ain’t happening in 2020, Year One of the Virus. Hurrah for that.

092 • Poor Tom Foolery

1st April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.)

078 • The Ominous Snowman

18th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

One burden of being a Roman
Is that, having been mugged by a snowman –
Which was merely an ogre
Wrapped up in a toga –
Great Cæsar must deem it An Omen.

Our Roman week continues. I don’t know if Tacitus or Suetonius or any of that crowd mention the above episode. But if it occurred, those who deny the meaninglessness of this world will undoubtedly have invested it with Weighty Significance.

070 • Grasshopper

10th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

063 • Slippery

3rd March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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?

2nd March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

27th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

057 • One bullet

26th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Onstage, in the unmatching shoes
A songwriter murders the blues.
My neighbour’s huge feet
Pound an unmatching beat.
One bullet. But which should I choose?

It’s tough enough living in a culture that tolerates second-rate musicians and audience extroverts with bad timing. But, worse still, an archaic constitutional right – to go armed – puts these irritating people’s lives in undeserved jeopardy.

055 • Puma uncertainty

24th February 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

There is no truth at all in the rumour
That I strangled my godfather’s puma.
But I’m licensed to choke
Those who can’t take a joke
And he really had no sense of humour.

In today’s world a bad reputation prospers exponentially, often fertilised by the antics of the gutter press. Referencing concepts from quantum mechanics, the ambiguous pronoun ‘he’ in our final line ensures uncertainty about who has been throttled (even in the most sublime poetry the ‘meaning’, if any, is perforce completed by the reader).

043 • Infiltrator (4)

12th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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]

035 • Westminster

4th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

029 • Infiltrator (2)

29th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Before I arrived in this city
I wrote to the Central Committee
Announcing my scheme
To rescind their regime
And abscond with the keys to the kitty.

Yes, indeed, announce your crimes well in advance. Then, once you’ve perpetrated them, the witless electorate will revere you as a person of your word. [Related story]

027 • Little Ned (2)

27th January 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Has lately been shot in the head.
Our Desk-Sergeant, Marcus,
Can show you the carcase.
No further light will be shed.

I didn’t get on with this dog, I admit. But I never wanted it to come to this. And the tone of the police memo, specifying their callous Desk-Sergeant merely by a chummy forename – leaves a great deal to be desired. [See also here]

010 • Everyman redux

10th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

John Dough, the old baker from Delph
At last had the town to himself.
The folk that he’d fed
All lay rigid in bed
Or folded away on a shelf.

In which a despairing artisan turns on his fellow Proles. A hint of Americanese may come through in the first couple lines of this piece, though it’s been a while.

009 • Press Barons

9th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I pity all those who aborted
My plan, unexpectedly thwarted,
‘To succour the needy
With blood from the greedy’
Which not one Press Baron supported.

Well maybe one Press Baron did support it, but regrettably our metre doesn’t readily permit that level of precision.

006 • Nero

6th January 2020 RL Comments 5 Comments

For Boris, the Emperor Nero
Was clearly a personal hero:
Self-centred, uncouth
A stranger to truth
And with street-credibility zero.

I blanch to have polluted readers’ minds with such a contemptible waste of DNA.

004 • Crime scene

4th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

‘Do you know where we’re going?’ said I
Yet the policewoman made no reply.
Now she’s driven ten times
Past the scene of my crimes
With a devilish glint in her eye.

‘Crimes’ that may not, in fact, be real. Our brow-beaten narrator is surely on the brink of delivering some specious confession.