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.
She longed for a dance with Disraeli;
Despatched ardent messages daily.
But weeks turned to years
As her cheeks burned with tears
And he never came down to the cèilidh
(Nor played on her pink ukulele).
She longed for a breakfast with Balfour
(As males go, she rated him Alpha):
But his strange emissar
In an accent bizarre
Said ‘He can’t even spare you a half-hour.’
She longed to ensnare Lord Macaulay
But he’d just pretend to be poorly.
Undaunted by failure
She fled to Australia
To marry the mayor of Kalgoorlie.
The lives of the British politicians about whom our predatory protagonist fantasises span the period 1800–1930, albeit in staggered array. Balfour was 11, and Disraeli 55, when Macaulay expired … so it seems scarcely probable that she might have harboured carnal expectations of all of them simultaneously. Readers who possess (and know how to use) a calculator will be ready to compute the probable span of her obsessions, and her likely age when she set her cap at the Antipodean mayor – but should not overlook the fact that gold was not discovered at Hannan’s Find (later called Kalgoorlie) until 1893.
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 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.’
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
My dream is to dance with Grace Kelly
Sharing one rubber glove and one welly,
Sharing one birthday suit,
Two bottles of Brut,
And three jars of cold K-Y Jelly.
Attentive readers may note that this charming, carefully-visualised fantasy fixates on a Screen Queen who has not made a single film in the last 64 years. What is it about the present generation of actresses, then, that so repels our imaginations, focusing them instead on past eras, eras of subtle ambiguity and romance, eras when one could never be sure whether ‘Brut’, for instance, signified a dry, sparkling wine, or a pungent preparation for disinfecting the male armpit.
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.
Guess the kettle has run out of cream
And the kitten’s got sick of the steam.
I used to convulse
At the throb of your pulse:
Now I dance to a different dream.
To live outside the law you must be honest, as our Great Poet saith. But it’s not easy to live outside the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which wants us to believe that organised systems tend towards chaos, unless energy is fed in to sustain their structure. Today’s bulletin – not written by me, but slipped under my door by the lovely Angharad – is intended to show me that her vital energy has not ebbed, but is rather being directed elsewhere. I conclude, however, that what has actually ebbed is her ability to organise metaphors convincingly. Unless she mixed those lines up on purpose in a cruel attempt at parody.
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.’
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’.
This has to be grounds for divorce
And she’s not shown the slightest remorse.
What makes me see red
Is stilettos in bed
When they burst my inflatable horse.
I trust loyal readers can endure a brief glimpse of my dirty laundry, as outlined above. Are we looking at ‘unreasonable conduct’ here, or ‘irretrievable breakdown’? (Please don’t alert Pope Clement VII to this matter, or things might end very badly. I live in hope that present-day mores condone divorce more readily than beheading, although – thanks to Unprincipled Egomaniacs in High Places – a new Dark Age beckons incontrovertibly.)
My love, while the weather is warm
(Almost three times the seasonal norm)
Let us sprawl in this field
With our soft parts revealed
Awaiting the imminent storm.
The storm is not ‘imminent’, it’s actual. What did St Greta tell you: ‘Make hay while the sun shines, make love while the world burns, make excuses while you bury your dead’? No, I don’t think it was that, but I wasn’t really listening.
One needs to be mentally nimble
To capture a gnat in a thimble
Or one pitiful crumb
In a ten-gallon drum
Or the quest for true love in one symbol.
To answer the poet point-for-point: who are these people who seek to capture gnats, and why do they set themselves up for failure by making thimbles their tool of choice? Who are these crumb-hunters who encumber their travails with such unwieldy and inappropriate canisters? And why oh why would anyone with even a single gram of common-sense waste their time dreaming up a symbol for some pointless and unattainable personal quest? We suddenly need some ersatz sequel to The Song of Solomon, do we?
Coition continued full-tilt
Till a cobra crawled out of the quilt;
This dampened the heat
In the Honeymoon Suite
And a quart of Veuve Clicquot got spilt.
Ordinary folk have little to fear from the proverbial ‘snake in the grass’, because the snake in the grass is minding his or her own business, in the same way as a bridal couple does on their wedding night. The non-proverbial ‘snake in the bedding’, however, is another story, and its kinship with the Garden of Eden narrative – from which humanity didn’t emerge particularly well – is not easily overlooked. For those who will wish to reflect on this matter a little, until we meet next Sunday, a suggested topic: ‘This House believes we should all be a lot happier if the cobra remained in the quilt next time: out of sight, out of mind.’
I’d love to be playing croquet
But there aren’t enough hours in the day.
Let’s wait till Angharad
And I have got married,
Then nothing will stand in my way.
Yeah right, nothing will stand in my way … except Angharad herself. Who’d have guessed? Maybe I should have asked her to join in the fun, of course, but it’s a bit late in the day for that now.
Forgetting the wives they’re forsaking
Men queue for a fling with Miss Faye King:
We all know she neuters
Her second-rate suitors.
It just seems a gamble worth taking.
Incredibly there are men who would disagree that emasculation, by some painted celluloid vamp, is ‘a gamble worth taking’. What abject feebletons! We Real Men can validate our virility only through high-profile competitive mating; an alpha Hollywood vedette is both a mirror for male vanity and an antidote to the slow poison of a complacent marriage. The conquest, and satisfaction, of such illusory femmes fatales constitutes a Darwinian endorsement, a seal of machismo. In our dreams, at any rate; our most ignoble and embarrassing dreams.
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?
The stresses and strains were quite striking
All my vigorous years as a Viking.
In a subsequent life
As Napoleon’s wife
Things were frankly much more to my liking.
There are lines, all up the stairwell at home, of suckers waiting to be fleeced by my hypnotist neighbour who – in exchange for fat wads of greenbacks – claims to ‘regress’ them to previous existences. Almost invariably they were once men of action, ladies of leisure, persons of consequence. Almost inevitably his lies plunge them into deeper and deeper disenchantment with the daily greyness of their workaday worlds. So I harangue them from the bottom landing: ‘Get a grip, people! There’s another life you can live for nothing! You’re in it, now: make a move, take time by the horns, burn down the haystack while the cuckoo crumbles.’ And as they bustle off home, equipped – by my visionary rhetoric – with destinies colorfully reimagined, they almost instinctively press fat wads of greedy greenbacks into my outstretched paws.
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]
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.
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.
My Andalusian amœba …
I summon her to me: ‘Arriba!’
Yet she sulks in her pool
Coquettish, but cruel:
Unbearable beauty, Bathsheba.
‘You saw her bathing on the roof,’ as Laughing Len sang, ‘Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew ya.’ But am I King David, or Farmer Boldwood, observing my innamorata through a specialist microscope, made by Óptica of Seville, and formerly in the possession of Luis Buñuel? Quite why this flirting – especially since it can scarcely be pursued to consummation – should so annoy a human marital partner is beyond me.
My match stalled at love-love with Freya,
A consummate shuttlecock player.
She fielded the blame
For our unfinished game
Though a lot of the culpa was mea.
‘Match-maker’, ‘player’, ‘score’, ‘clean sheet’ – sporting jargon is readily confused with informal terms relating to the so-called Battle of the Sexes. Did the lovely Freya catch me on the rebound? Did I take one for the team? A gentleman’s lips are sealed. Or they were sealed. But this Friday is Freya-day. I fear it will be a long walk to the pavilion.
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.
Seduction is strained, in Siberia
Where trysts mostly end in hysteria.
‘I despise you!’ they shrill,
Vaulting over the cill
And abseiling down the wisteria.
I admit it’s a good while since I had an apartment in Tomsk, so I trust readers will excuse my memory if certain botanical details in this brief, and otherwise veridical, scenario strike them as inauthentic.
I observe that your wife has undressed.
My brief telepathic request
Was never expected
To be intercepted …
I trust you don’t think me a pest.
The priest who spouts Mosaic law forbids us to ‘covet’ another man’s wife; the attorney, blethering about ‘criminal conversation’, concerns himself with ‘physical contact with an alien and unlawful organ’. These pests aside, where does blame lie in the present, sad case? The disrobing spouse, responding to a supernaturally-registered suggestion, perhaps believes she is obeying the will of a Higher Power. Can the true issuer of that command really be guilty, if he never expected his libidinous impulses to come to light? Many would consider him no adulterer; but more would consider him a fool, since – by apologising so stiffly to the no-doubt startled husband – he proclaims his otherwise-unprovable involvement. Yet, to the woman, the putative adulterer is a hero, having rescued her from possible charges of wilful exhibitionism, or lewd and wanton provocation. Bravo for him, therefore; and huzzah for such a tiny bulletin, fairly bursting with such sapient doctrine.
It’s hard to be horrid to Hannah,
That winsome and whimsical manner,
The bugs in her bread,
The bones in her bed,
The blood on her Bunty bandanna.
All readers will surely be familiar with this kind of weekend acquaintance, in the presence of whose surface charms we knowingly turn a blind eye to one or more unsettling indicators of their workaday life.
I went to the Garden of Love
To marry my sweet turtle-dove.
But we got so depressed
In that tiny, cramped nest
That we each gave the other the shove.
The first line, above, is appropriated from Our Great Poet; the rest is triteness itself … well-suited to the wearisome scenario it depicts. A cuckoo typically expels its step-siblings, and step-parents, in order to annex their space for itself; but in this instance the nest is left wholly untenanted. One might expect close confines to provide the perfect milieu for connubial satisfaction; but here they promote a different category of physical cooperation. A significant degree of acrobatic rapport must have been required for the partners to achieve simultaneous expulsion.
Oh how I delight in your snoring!
A riot of sizzle and roaring:
A nightly recital
So varied, so vital,
Your daytime assertions seem boring.
As a general rule the professional male of a certain age regards the secrets of the boudoir as sacrosanct. Yet, as we see above, the day will dawn in most long-established relationships when it becomes a tactical inevitability that certain hitherto-undisclosed truths be revealed.
I have to confess, I’m in shock
At your plan to stop winding our clock.
Are you scared of the chime,
Or the passage of time?
Its tick is much worse than its tock.
You can either stare a looming personal crisis right in the eye, or try to make light of it. A short blast of nonsense – establishing some kind of bogus dualism at the heart of the matter – should be sufficient to test the troubled waters.
My brother had trained his bonobo
To play a few tunes on the oboe.
I bought my baboon
A good contra-bassoon
Yet that night she eloped with a hobo.
I have been reprimanded (hounded, even) about a ‘misanthropic tone’ that supposedly suffuses this poetical blog. ‘Has mankind accomplished nothing you would consider celebrating?’ writes one disenchanted correspondent. Well, it has: the admirable Great Ape Project has urged that chimps, bonobos and other such anthropoids should be accorded the same basic rights as human beings (exactly which human beings remains open to question). And no less a territory than The Balearic Islands extended personhood rights to the Great Apes as long ago as 2007 (one of that tribe holds temporary sway in my home country). But – cf bulletin #222 here at My Dog Errol – such envelope-stretching can come at a terrible price.
Farewell to my loris, Louise,
Who loved to curl up on my knees.
She felt like a friend
Till she forced me to spend
Such a fortune in medical fees.
In a civilised society, such as we nominally aspire to, a true friendship would endure even as the associated medical bills began to pile up. In trans-species relationships, however, this aspirational principle appears to be tainted by a culpable, chauvinistic parsimony.
An astronaut’s moll named Amanda
Went down in the NASA moon-lander.
Neil and Buzz got away
But she’s there to this day
Penning anti-US propaganda.
Year on year we remember Apollo 11 and its plucky pilots; yet we hear little of the lonely martyr who renounced our planet, choosing instead to rail against its greatest nation from a nearby satellite. Sadly this marooned dissident’s solitary effusions register as mere pinpricks alongside the crass proclamations, 51 years later, of the Overgrown Baby whose vacuous tweetings make his country a daily laughing-stock across the entire world.
The great Russian cosmonaut, Yuri,
Was fired into space with a houri.
But when they came down
His face wore a frown
And hers wore a mask of cold fury.
Though the literal truth of this fragment is debatable, it is a parable fit to illustrate any sermon about the moral and ethical implications of sex in space. (The Kremlin evidently didn’t expect the Creator to take pity on the lonely Gagarin, and fashion a companion for him by repurposing a redundant rib).
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).
“On Saturday night, for my sins,
The sex-robot gave birth to twins:
Yeah, sounds kinda sweet
But the brats are on heat –
And that’s where my problem begins.”
The vicar made no apology for basing his sermon on a rhyme copied from a lavatory door. As the future promises ever-more realistic robots, he asserted, the poem’s scenario will become commonplace, posing ‘hitherto unexampled moral dilemmas’ for mankind. He seemed more interested in delineating ‘transgressive urges’ than in recommending how we should handle them.
You may glimpse our Owner, Sir Harold,
In tweedy tuxedo apparelled:
His wife is a Dame,
With a stupid long name,
And his heirs are all quadruple-barrelled.
Ownership, surely the root of all evil. And Sir Harold, so blinded by his own wealth, or that of his privileged partner, that all notions of good taste in tailoring have flown out of the window.
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.
At our meeting to Forge the New Way
I was baffled by Paragraph A.
When we fell into bed
Stumped by Paragraph Z
I had understood nothing all day.
A day’s work at the office, or, equally, an entry from the ‘Progress Log’ that the marriage guidance counsellor insists that I keep. But enough about that. Note the classy use of the British ‘Z’ here.
In the season that followed the flood
When the world was in bloom, or in bud,
Mrs Noah complained
‘Since this planet got drained
My husband’s been stuck in the mud.’
All too often the wife feels sidelined during the enaction of a Manly Project, and finds it difficult to empathise with the exhaustion and ennui experienced by the husband when it’s over. The more so, when every other creature within eye- and ear-shot has gone forth to multiply with a vengeance.
A churlish charwoman from Cheddar
Whose boss seemed reluctant to bed her
Tore up, in frustration,
His Nobel citation
And ran his research through the shredder.
I took a look at Cheddar on my first UK visit, way back. It’s kinda nice and they have a mini-canyon you can run along. Unexpectedly it’s also the setting for this topical revenge scenario, as the boffin-geek denies his cleaner an habitual perk of employment. #MeNeither
One evening (a tiny bit drunk)
My room-mate befriended a skunk.
When I voiced my regret
He said ‘Don’t be upset,
She’ll be safe on the uppermost bunk.’
Preachers urge us to find the best in our fellows, and not jump to the lazy conclusion that ‘there’s no smoke without fire’. Yet it’s hard to believe, in the present instance, that the room-mate’s intentions are, in the long term, Platonic. ‘O perilous fire that in the bed-straw bredeth’, as our great poet observed.
As the cops drag a corpse from the Ouse:
‘Look Sarge, it’s all covered in clues!’
‘Wrong. The arm says “Suzanne”,
But it’s clearly a man.’
‘Right! We can’t trust a bloke with tattoos.’
This little cameo might suggest that The Boys in Blue — for all their open-mindedness, emotional intelligence and forensic acumen — haven’t quite got their heads around Gender Fluidity yet.
My dining companion at Neath
Drew a long scary knife from its sheath:
‘You have to get rough
When the steaks are this tough,’
She explained, as she sharpened her teeth.
This was damnably alarming when it happened, and it’s only now, a couple years later, that I realise it’s a neat symbol for the way we damage ourselves by bad eating. [for Ceridwen]
‘Come sailing?’ said Frankie to Johnny.
‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Can I bring Connie?’
As old ballads tell us
When F. got quite jealous
That picnic went right down The Swanee.
‘This story has no moral, this story has no end. This story only goes to show that there ain’t no good in men’. ‘No, nor women neither.’ It all hinges on the word ‘jealous’. No doubt tabloid readers will judge Bisexual Temptress Connie the guiltiest of the three.
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.
I lived with my bellicose bride
Not far from the mouth of the Clyde.
Our little oil-rig
Felt surprisingly big
For somewhere with nowhere to hide.
The past-tense ‘lived’ in this brief statement is ominous. Any bride might be bellicose, having so egregious a dwelling foisted on her by matrimony: yet no hint of blame attaches to husband in the poem – rather, he merely personifies the expectation of a violent dénouement.
Glancing back, I notice Rivers of the World has become a bit of theme at My Dog Errol: this is the ninth and, let’s hope, last instalment.
‘Dear Cleo,’ said Julius Cæsar
(He was trying his utmost to please her),
‘I do like the style
Of your place near the Nile,
That huge Leaning Tower of Giza.’
We must guess that Cleopatra’s response was something along the lines of ‘Cease this detestable though widespread practice of patronising your host civilisation by construing it in terms of the paltry achievements of your own country.’
Our eminent emperor, Trajan
Was minded to marry a Cajun.
But processing in pomp
Through her Baton Rouge swamp
His cohort succumbed to contagion.
Empires are forged and maintained by matrimony; here Trajan’s men are thwarted in their attempt to bring him a trophy bride from exotic, as-yet undiscovered territory, and in the particular case few would doubt that the virus was doing a sterling job.
‘We met on a mauve double-decker
That never quite made it to Mecca.
Now she lives in a squat
But my life’s gone to pot,’
Said the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This historical piece harks back to a distant time when posing on the Hippie Trail held more noble allure for a university graduate than posing as an investment analyst in The City.
‘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]
In a horrible hostel at Dover
My sister seduced Casanova.
I blush to recall
How their sport, through the wall,
Spoilt my chess match with Anna Pavlova.
It sure wasn’t the Chelsea Hotel, but the high concentration of ‘names’ from various arts and eras made it the perfect battleground for (yet) another bout of sibling rivalry.
Tonight sees the funeral feast
Of Ned the Chihuahua (dec’d).
As principle mourner
I’ll crouch in the corner
And hurl chunks of Pal at the priest.
One might well have passed the redundant stocks of dog-food to another pet-owner, but pelting the ‘priest’ (ie the creature’s sobbing ex-proprietor) with it is a much more cathartic option. [See also here]
They sit in the tempest, together
(She tickles his nose with a feather,
He scratches her sternum
With sprigs of laburnum)
Ignoring the world and the weather.
Valentine’s Day typically falls a in month of storms and tempests. True lovers, however, rise above any meteorological inconvenience.
Vacationing in The Bahamas
Misfortune befell the Obamas.
On the night she forgot
Where they’d anchored their yacht
A crocodile stole his pyjamas.
It’s a question of scale, no?
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]
Karl Marx lived in Notting Hill Gate
With a world-weary waitress named Thwaite.
Yet until she retired
Every thing he desired
Was handed to him on a plate.
An indictment of bourgeois hypocrisy, or an evocation of True Love? Apparently her name was Tanya. (Adjustment of the geography of London, and of certain other particulars, has been necessary to make this piece come out satisfactorily).
How pleasant to meet Piltdown Man
The fount of our whole human clan:
With Lucy his wife
They’re the source of all life
Dating back before records began.
Think, on the other hand, how disgusted our primitive ancestors would be to encounter us, now that we’ve laid waste the world that brought them into being. Although – a pedantic note here – I believe there are now question-marks hanging over Lucy’s identity, in some scholarly circles.