Look honey, a souvenir-seller:
Go pick up a Pilgrim Umbrella!
Hold it up like a guide
As before me you stride:
In a month I may make Compostella.
NOW BRING ME A SEAFOOD PAELLA.
The same problem arises in every country. The gluttonous tourist, too slothful to maintain a normal walking pace, yearns unashamedly for street food and relies, unabashed, on his beleaguered partner to signpost a spiritual path that he’s too self-indulgent to decipher for himself.
Said a blustering braggart from Bingley,
‘I can swallow ten scorpions, singly,
Then twelve jalapenos
That burn like volcanoes
And still swear my tonsils aren’t tingly.’
I challenged him, ‘Chew on this pie
Packed with gunpowder, chillies, and lye.’
(And gravy so gingery
Permanent injury
Threatened his throat, by the by).
Then I watched the first slice disappear
And his silly fat face lost its sneer:
As his gums glowed red hot, his
Engorged epiglottis
Put paid to his boasting career.
Of course I concede that the above bulletin is not entirely true, and that it was not penned for publication at My Dog Errol, but rather on the ‘Readers’ Homilies’ page in our Parish Magazine. It illustrates something from the Bible, as I recall. It was rejected by the Vicar (on grounds of length, I can only assume).
‘’Tis an etching,’ said old Piranesi,
‘And kindly don’t tell me I’m crazy.
If you say “engraving”
It’s not me that’s raving
It’s you being mentally lazy.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN JALFREZI.
The same problem arises in every era: the Old Master indulges his penchant for pedantic pontification, while relying on others to minister to his basic bodily requirements. A man unable to cook is in no position to hector those untroubled by the self-involved niceties of his Terms of Art, ‘engraving’ and ‘etching’.
Today my old dachshund, Delphine,
Dropped dead in this trendy canteen.
‘You can say au revoir
To your Michelin star,’
I said. ‘So much for Nouvelle Cuisine.’
NOW BRING ME A CHICKEN CHOW MIEN.
The human spirit is infinitely resourceful, it seems. Unwilling to succumb to the grief that typically attends the expiry of a cur, our narrator turns the event to advantage, knowing that – once the press gets hold of the story – the reputation of one more pretentious ‘fooderie’ will be irredeemably trashed. Who wants to eat their supper in some joint where canine corpses are scattered about? Or in a restaurant that welcomes living dogs, come to think of it?
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.
Today our great monarch, King Louis
Is planning to ban ratatouille,
And pass a new law
Which (to curb Habsburg Jaw)
Will require all our food to be chewy.
NOW BRING ME A DISH OF CHOP SUEY.
Classic overkill from a monomaniacal tyrant. By all means take steps to extirp a congenital deformity brought on by in-breeding. But why impose dietary sanctions on the ornery populace? Don’t these potentates realise that they look weird only because the rest of us have normal jaws? Far more appetising, then, to address the problem by making ratatouille an obligatory staple, so that – if it really causes that egregious chin condition – we shall all, in time, look like our freakish overlords, and cease to lampoon and satirise them.
‘Hi; this is your bartender, Barney.
So sorry: your chilli con carne
Has gone by mistake
To the shack of a Sheikh
Who’d only sent out for a sarnie.’
NOW BRING ME A LAMB BIRYANI.
Too work-obsessed to think of catering for himself, the rhymester receives the phone-call everybody dreads. Sadly his response – too spontaneously Wordsworthian to be constrained within his verse-form of choice – is merely a variation on the original impulse, to rely on carry-out: it is certain to lead to further disappointment.
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.
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.)
Please note, your saxophonist, ‘Baz’,
With his ear-splitting urge to play ‘jazz’
Is required to abstain
Or else Take the A Train …
To Alaska, if not Alcatraz.
Who wants to live in a world whose free-spirited exponents of improvised music can be threatened with exile to a notorious penitentiary, solely for practising their art in places where others might overhear? Not I. Surveillance is a scourge, aural fascism a tyranny. And the intolerant voice of this bulletin appears to be upset as much by the would-be musician’s hipster sobriquet as by the unruly racket the neighborhood is nightly obliged to endure.
Please note that the cleaner, McCall,
Is banished henceforth from The Hall:
Her nightly manoeuvres
With hosepipes and Hoovers
Drive too many guests up the wall.
In the owner’s estimation, paying guests are paramount and must be sucked up to at all costs. So a skivvy loses her job, not via a grateful note and cash in lieu of notice, but by dint of a curt note sellotaped to her locker door. Soon ‘The Hall’ will be filthy with dust-bunnies and aristocratic dandruff, and customers will stop coming. And the owner will have reaped his just deserts.
It’s true, you have patrons a-plenty
While I have far fewer than twenty.
Your job, my dear boy
Is to please hoi polloi
While I tease the true cognoscenti.
This bulletin pretty accurately reports some words that lately passed between a Blogger-in-Rhyme and a New Formalist Villanelle-Wrangler. I invite my legion of readers all across the globe to work out which of the two uttered them, and to what effect.
Please note that your strumpet, Cecile,
Is barred from our Thanksgiving meal.
She gets your dear father
Worked up in a lather:
Myself, I don’t see the appeal.
The tiny fault-lines that extended families ignore for most of the working year can suddenly broaden into ravines of foreboding as Thanksgiving looms, and the tribe prepares to converge on the parental ranch. This mother’s note – deploring the husband’s lecherous preoccupation with their son’s voluptuous consort – betrays the tragic depths of her jealous insecurity. ‘Book yourself a makeover, Mom!’ comes the reply. ‘It’s not as though you’re strapped for cash.’
This pod is controlled from a distance:
Press button to summon assistance.
Squirt sample in funnel.
Scream ‘Help me!’ down tunnel
Till system confirms your existence.
Obviously it is sensible that machines should validate the identity of their human masters, before coming to our rescue. We should applaud the Authorities who have programmed them so assiduously in their own image.
Please note that your ward, Abigail,
Did not gain a place here at Yale;
The Provost reviled
The ‘preposterous child’
While his staff found her ‘stupid’ and ‘stale’.
Well, I didn’t gain a place at Yale either, and I urge Abigail, and other rejects like her, to wear the disdain of ivory-tower eggheads as a badge of freshness and distinction. Either that, or to sweet-talk their guardian into endowing some hifalutin’ think-tank there, with free education for his dunderheaded protégée a specified condition of contract.
Please note that your daughter-in-law
May no longer trade as a whore.
Her clients drive cars
Far, far larger than ours
And we don’t want folk thinking we’re poor.
The author of this note, discreetly popped through a neighbor’s letterbox, rightly equates social status with automobile dimensions. Such objective measures are much more reliable and indicative than a mere moralistic objection to the young relation’s profession. It is never appropriate to sit in judgment over a woman’s right to choose.
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.
Please note that your godfather, Geir,
Though scarcely a social pariah,
Has a squint and a hump
That make decent folk jump
So we’re slinging him out of the choir.
‘Decent folk’ … what a world of repugnance and shame that nauseating phrase brings up. If we all boycotted ensembles where such a term is used in earnest, choral singing would cease overnight. No bad thing, you might retort. But that end must not be accomplished by marginalising the Geirs and quasi-Geirs in our society … who are legion.
Please note: there’s no rational reason
Why Summer’s a popular season,
Why Spring has its voters
And Fall its promoters,
Yet longing for Winter is treason.
‘Winter of our discontent’. ‘Nuclear winter’. ‘My corpse’s wintry mien’. To go on would risk wearying the good-hearted, and alienating cultivated opinion. Or would it? Our thoughts echo unwittingly with such discriminatory language. How long, people, until a Winter Awakening? We have much to learn from decent folk South of the Equator, where such biased talk is seldom heard. Come on, Northern Hemisphere! If it wasn’t for Winter, FFS, I wouldn’t have been born at all! And I bet I’m not the only one.
The pink billet-doux read ‘Dear John,
I have taken the children and gone.
Accept your comeuppance
’Cos no-one cares twopence;
It’s time to give up and move on.’
I saw it coming, as did my many readers who have been inboxing me with words of support. Thank you, thank you. Nonetheless it’s a bitter blow. She could have got my name right, the cow.
Please note that your stepson, Francisco,
Is banned from this evening’s Class Disco.
When everyone queues
To kiss Mrs Hughes
A normal-sized child will get his go.
Modern-day teachers show commendable dedication, generosity and imagination in devising bonding exercises, early in the academic year, that will incline their young charges to warm to the grade school experience. This tersely-worded bulletin, however, gives the receiving family insufficient sense of their unfortunate stepchild’s infraction. Is he too large, or too small, to join his new class buddies in Inappropriate Touching with their tutor?
Please note that your child, Mary-Lou,
Is banned from our trip to the zoo.
The keepers advise
That a girl of her size
Might get killed by a rogue cockatoo.
Please note, rather, that a truly enlightened society would ban all children from visiting all zoos, the better to hasten their abolition. Since vested interests will surely strive to keep them in business we must – however ruefully – concede that the extinguishing of a few toddlers, by vengeful Psittaciformes bursting forth from internment, might prove a useful catalyst in turning the tide of public opinion against such egregious institutions.
Said Fred to a frizzy-haired floosie,
‘I rather enjoy my jacuzzi:
If I ply you with gin
Will you join me therein?
And cherries as well, if you’re choosy.’
Then Suzy responded, ‘I getcha,
You sad and pedantic old lecher.
Avert thy vile eye
Lest I smite thee thereby
And despatch thee to hell on a stretcher.’
The elderly gentleman’s request to the lady is, on the face of it, civilized enough; yet she takes offense, and appears ready to do him violence. We should be aware that the now-impermissible label ‘floosie’ is not uttered in her hearing, unless she is somehow privy to the word-choices of the narrator from whose brain she has sprung. And her imputation of pedantry (based solely on the gentleman’s use of ‘therein’, which is no longer current in British conversation, yet perfectly justified when there’s a necessary rhyme to complete) seems a tad arch in a young person from whose lips archaisms such as ‘smite’, ‘thee’ and ‘thereby’ spill in such preposterous abundance. [See also #122]
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.
Enough of your ifs, buts and maybes,
I need to know when I’ll catch rabies.
Please, Government analysts,
Pundits and panellists,
Treat us like brothers, not babies.
Ever feel you’re being patronised, kept in the dark about the virus crisis, by the vested interests that run the media or stand to profit from the pandemic? More comfortable, isn’t it, than recognising your histrionic worries for what they truly are – the atavistic bleating of the self-obsessed toddler you continue to cherish at the core of your being.
On balance, I share your dismay
At the meteorite heading this way.
Such rumours aren’t new
But if this one is true
We’d be wise to start packing today.
Oh, these Overgrown Etonians with their sang congelé in the face of a population-threatening calamity, acknowledged by all neighbouring Governments! Where was the decisiveness, the adrenaline? This entitled lassitude, this phlegmatic indifference to the Commoners’ Fate, shall not go forgotten.
When Cæsar spurned Artemidorus
His senators hollered in chorus,
‘That prophet’s our geeza,
Not you, Mr Cæsar!
Your hubris is starting to bore us.’
Our narrative here differs in several key respects from Shakespeare’s account of the same (15 March 44 BC) episode. Hard to tell who got it right. But a similar marginalisation of the expert, by the egotistical leader, is a perpetual curse in public life.
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.
That coroner’s waiting till autumn
To start on your puppy’s post-mortem.
Well the later he gawps
At Ned’s pitiful corpse
The sooner I get to report him.
Maybe I did nothing to make Ned’s brief life agreeable; but I can certainly compensate by a vengeful attack on the slothful bureaucracy that thinks nothing of delaying his funeral. [See also here]
Why, hark! ’Tis the hornet-detector:
‘Intruders at large in this sector!
We don’t want our honey
To taste or smell funny.
Go home, and stop nicking our nectar.’
Island Mentality in a nutshell. The xenophobic bee whose words we report seems to have scant understanding of the mechanisms of his own livelihood. Free movement of ‘outsiders’ is clearly about to end.
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]
Please note that your puppy-dog, Ned,
Is banned from the marital bed.
Henceforth I expect him
To lick his vile rectum
On top of the wardrobe instead.
Ned is long gone, mercifully, but traumatic memories remain, not least of this memo’s over-stern wording. [See also here]
Genuine poets will sigh, coo
And swear that ‘We honestly like, ooh,
We love your new pieces;
(Your doggerel’s faeces
But Hey! It’s OK to write Haiku!)’
Personally I’ve got nothing in particular against highbrows, and in this instance they’ve got a point: 366 days of churning out three-line snippets that don’t even have to rhyme would have been a far less demanding challenge than the one I’ve embarked upon. Nevertheless I have no intention of downgrading.