Spirit world 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?

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.

332 • Semen / cement

27th November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said philosopher-poet John Ruskin
On exhuming a half-rotten buskin
‘Hopping round in this boot
Will cement my repute
As an expert in all things Etruscan.’

And revered archæologist Schliemann
Slept out (to discourage a demon)
’Neath a Bacofoil™ awning,
Yet woke every morning
Quite sodden with incubus semen.

Is it something about their preoccupation with the remote past that distorts the mental processes of such famous men? Perhaps they fell into recondite professions precisely because they were unable to relate convincingly to the way ordinary folk make sense of the world? Or, if the above tales are reckless fictions, do they nonetheless ring true because we instinctively sense that a particular echelon, existing in intellectual society, assumes it can get away with murder?

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.

306 • Regicide

1st November 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

With all common sense in abeyance
I summoned MacBeth, at a seance
(The usual procedure
The cards and the ouija)
But no one ‘came through’ (except Fleance).

In Shakespeare’s time the monarch was revered as God’s representative on earth, and to kill him (or her) was a sin without parallel. Today, of course, such potentates as we still acknowledge are more typically reviled as emissars of Satan. In our moments of deepest despair, therefore, we might wish to be possessed by some high-flying assassin, and to accomplish what needs to be accomplished; but in fact all we can muster is the spirit of an obscure runaway, remembered only for fleeing a scene of monstrous injustice – an epitome of cravenness in crisis.

303 • Beyond the Grave

29th October 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Though Alison Gross is a witch
She clearly has Absolute Pitch,
Screaming perfect Top Cs
At the sky and the trees
While her body lies dead in a ditch.

In many countries today the loudest voices are indeed those of the departed; their noisome legacy is routinely summarised in resonant soundbites whose catchiness masks, for many, the emptiness of their achievements.

286 • A-listers

12th October 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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

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

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.

256 • Other lives

12th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

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.

250 • Arms of Mary

6th September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

While dancing with Mother Teresa
I noticed she carried a Taser,
Three Colt .45s
And six slaughterman’s knives
(No wonder the other nuns praise her).

Sentimentalists point to tininess and piety to explain the extraordinary career of Sister Mary Teresa (whose Feast Day was yesterday); the above snapshot lays the emphasis on feisty preparedness. In deciding which side to take, be sure to avoid gender bias.

245 • Succulent

1st September 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

From the front door I called, ‘Hallo Vera,
Could you come just a little bit nearer?
There is one simple test
I must run on each guest
To be certain she’s not a chimæra.’

Some would argue that Vera wasn’t a ‘guest’ when I hailed her in public; and others that a woman snatched from the street isn’t really a guest either. I reject such censorious insinuations. My tests invariably concluded that the persons I sought to address were unattainable, in virtue of their being illusions. There’s not a court in all Siberia – nor, for all I know, in the wider world – that would convict a man for ‘bending his eye on vacancy’. Are you trying to tell me the law is an ass? #MeNeither

191 • Postcard (3)

9th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

The postcard I sent Seamus Heaney
Asked ‘Have you been watching The Sweeney?’
‘Good luck, and get lost,’
Was his simple riposte
(The same as I got from Puccini).

Here we find a further instance of post-life coincidence, where two masters of different arts, from different countries, and from different times, are united in a single opinion which – though manifestly dismissive – is expressed with endearingly musical alliteration, and a paradoxical wit. [See also here and here]

187 • Ms Clayton recollected

5th July 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Our Junior teacher, Ms Clayton,
Disparaged the books of Len Deighton:
‘Too dismal, too bloody!
Instead let us study
My Odes to the Glory of Satan.’

‘Clayface’, as she was always known, had little idea what teenage boys enjoy reading – nor, indeed, what Bible-belt parents consider appropriate. I think she was from The Bronx, or Brooklyn. At that age, I imagined they were the same place.

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]

166 • Deep Fake

14th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

That evening with Truman Capote
He praised the great power of peyote.
I think it was him,
Though he looked pretty grim,
Part capon and partly coyote.

Ingestion of psychoactive substances is a significant component in many a religious ritual, and our species surely benefits from experiencing, or seeming to experience, the world from the viewpoint of non-human, ‘totemic’ animals. In the present bulletin, however, it’s unclear whether the author, or the writer he alludes to, is under the drug’s influence.

162 • Meet the team (17)

10th June 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A poltergeist, gaunt and grotesque
Sometimes haunts the Enquiries Desk.
When it flings rusty knives
Clients flee for their lives,
Even shrieking the word ‘Kafkaesque’.

This warning is well-meant, no doubt; but it is unclear whether the supposed spectre is a visiting querent, or an employee detailed to impart information. In fact both sides of the Enquiries Desk, in any normal institution, will inevitably be fraught with tiresome memories of frustration and misunderstanding.

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.

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?

117 • Rhine recovery

26th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I was casting my pearls before swine
When the fattest one fell in the Rhine.
Two nuns in Cologne
Fished it out with a drone,
But more by good luck than design.

Like many a parable, this poem probably answers more questions than it asks. In terms of title I toyed with ‘The Pearl Fishers’ and ‘The Pig Fishers’ but decided that either would be thoroughly misleading. In any event, the point is proven: one man’s miracle is another man’s coincidence.

110 • Niger

19th April 2020 RL Comments 2 Comments

Adrift on the old river Niger,
Just me and the prophet Elijah
And a Woman in White
Who likes watching men fight –
So we take it in turns to oblige her.

Some ‘Sunday fools’ still believe spirits move among us, and a few, perhaps, suppose that they’re prepared to conspire with mortals in illogical, Lawrentian pacts. But what we’re really investigating here is the troubling, antiquated trope of Objectified Woman as Muse. Perhaps she is a spirit too?

103 • Orinoco communion

12th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

We scattered your ashes, dear Yoko,
On the tides of the great Orinoco.
Then we stood on the bank
Where we mournfully drank
One very small cup of cold cocoa.

Strangely our culture dignifies rivers with names, and admiring soubriquets such as ‘great’. But here that adjective serves to minimise the status of the departed, as does the meagre potation, shared among an unspecified number of mourners.

095 • Yangtze Kiang

4th April 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

As I drift down the Yangtze Kiang
I shall scream about Sturm, and then Drang.
If the onlooking horde
Fails to cheer, or applaud
They shall hear a yet harsher harangue.

Anyone remember the days when a troubled youth could devote a sophomore vacation to exhibitionistic acts of existential self-exorcism? The Chinese ‘hordes’ didn’t listen for long, it has to be admitted.

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.

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.

077 • Epoch envy

17th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Dead Cæsar was texting dead Brutus:
‘We needed mobility scooters.
If Rome was so clever
Then how come we never
Had smartphones or cars or computers?’

A Roman theme appears to be emerging at My Dog Errol … God knows why. Still, the idea that any sophisticated civilisation from another time would look admiringly on our present, chaotic epoch is pretty laughable, no?

068 • Bishop Berkeley

8th March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

I never supposed Bishop Berkeley
Would seem, as a spectre, so sparkly.
It’s frankly nightmarish
To see him so garish
Especially through a glass, darkly.

Berkeley argued that what we see exists only in the mind. If this is indeed a spectre, it would seem to be offering some kind of ironic comment on that theory. More probably, however, our narrator has been the victim of brainwashing by pious parents or Bible-bashing teachers in high-school.

061 • Delinquents

1st March 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

A posse of querulous crones
Went out in the dark to throw stones.
One struck a black cloud
Which split, like a shroud
As the angels glared down from their thrones

Our scenario here may seem improbable, but of course the demonisation of the Energetic Older Woman is not. No surprise, then, that the angels glared.

040 • Brecon

9th February 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

Said the priest in the parish of Brecon,
‘This God thing is finished, I reckon.
I’ll hang up my cassock
And crouch on this hassock
Till fresh opportunities beckon.’

Disillusion is the mother of liberation, it’s often said. But it’s all too easy to ‘crouch’, in passive expectancy, amid the ruins of an outmoded belief system, rather than seeking out – or forging – a fresh one.

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?

013 • Postcard

13th January 2020 RL Comments 0 Comment

My postcard to Cardinal Newman
Asked, ‘What does it mean to be human?’
‘It means “Knowing You’ll Die”’
Was his simple reply
(I got the same answer from Schumann).

This kind of thoughtful feedback from historical figures is somehow heartening, even if their message is occasionally rather bleak.