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My cerebos is filled with whirring dervishes of words:
If musing be the fool I love, play on, I tell my brains—
Across the wild synopses, and like hellesponts in
herds,
Their shocking electrolyses bring verses and refrains.
Poetry makes something harp on. Orton knew his
stuff,
Forever decomposing, or inventing a new forum.
Occasionally revisionist, he wrote some off the scruff;
Though grace is not to the swift, he was Victoria
Ludorum.
All writers have to write because they hear Time’s
wicked chariot,
The breathless hush in their clothes tonight,
presentiments of doom:
They want to wear the lory-leaf, win Guinness like a
Lariat,
Be published as in Askelon, before they reach their
tomb.
And I shall hear the carrion call till flesh is petrified,
With poetic inspissation, with my mandrill blue to
twitch in —
I am trying, Egypt, trying — hear my blood’s repulsive
pride.
If you cannot stand my heart, you should get out of
my kitchen.
Bill Greenwell
To urn her tinder love, so sweat,
My balaclava I shall play
And to my liver, Juliet,
I’ll sing a moving malady;
For she is to my licking dear,
Appalling — and by beauty blest,
And with her, snog beside me here,
I’ll rest my head upon her beast.
Each night with batted breath I wait
To catch, perchance, one fleeing view,
I witch her window long and late
To see her wince again anew;
Though apposition to our joy
Bars wedded-onion hops for now,
Bereave me! I’m her wander-boy
And someday we’ll be hatched, I vow.
Alan Millard
Teaching is not affective any more
Though persecuted with the best intentions.
But we had Latin in my days of your,
And learned our congregations and dimensions.
We did metallurgies in English, too,
Coined livid megaphone and simulation;
We learned to read without too much adieu,
Using fanatics for annunciation.
But now young people, some with good decrees,
Misspell vexed messages on nubile phones,
Listen to low-downs on their empathies
And speak of giggle-bites and cool ringtones.
They watch rude films at home on vindaloo,
And flout themselves in Phrasebook on the ‘net’.
What sort of perspex are we coming to?
The times are viscous; carve my epithet.
Noel Petty
My party got a mandrake from the people,
So I’m the reprehensive of my town.
I’m not a supple thinker, just a Joe
Who came, and saw and conned, like Gordon Brown.
A pope once rightly called a little earning
A dangerous thing, with which I quite concuss,
But worry not for I’m in no great pearl,
I’m rich as Creases, with expenses plus.
Fox popular is what the clever call me
Though Larkin’s not a language I can speak;
Your art and ligature are things beyond me,
And Shaker’s plays to me are agent Greek.
Don’t think I want to be PM or Chancer,
I’m pleased to be a prawn in miner rows;
Some punter once remarked — I think, acutely —
They also serve who only sit and doze.
Frank McDonald
Mrs M: For me, Sir Anthony, the play lacked all credulity. Who, I ask, has ever perpetuated so persistently erogenous a choice of words as that Mrs Malapert? Is it not recumbent upon a playwright to show us to ourselves?
Sir A: Indeed, ma’am, ‘to hold, as ‘twere, a looking glass up to nature’.
Mrs M: Ah, ready as ever with an apt illusion. The bawd of Avon, was it not? By how much does he accede our Mr R.B. Sheringham!
Sir A: You are right, ma’am. He had ‘little Latin and less Greek’, and yet ‘he was not for an age but the rest of time’. Ben Jonson, ma’am.
Mrs M: Sir Anthony, you are a veritable pharmacopoeia of quotation. But tempers fudge it, as the Romanians say.
Sir A: ‘Leaving is such sweet sorrow’, but ‘our revels now are over’ and our carriage awaits. ‘Lead on, Macduff.’
Keith Norman
Competition No. 2565 Minor key
You are invited to submit a poem (16 lines maximum) about the minor irritations of life written in heroic couplets. Entries to ‘Competition 2565’ by 2 October or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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