Evensong, worn thin through scraping
'Nautilus shall be my theme',
Declared the naughty lass
As she pranced upon the spume
Behind the looking-glass
For, peradventure, she descried
In dim, refracted haze
The ordinance that was decreed
In less pernicious days
Its lusty tenor was the stuff
That drove the Kraken mad
And made him chew upon the chaff
That beggared Galahad
Our heroine made out the words:
The Kraken wrote the bill;
He scrawled on sundry dusty shards
With walrus-feather quill
His manners were atrocious,
His quiff both suave and droll
If, to some tastes, obnoxious
And caustic to the soul
The law set out, in letters stiff,
What naughty lasses dread
To wit that they shall inhale snuff
Long after they be dead
For snuff, in life, is bad enough,
In purgatory too;
But, when it's heaped up in a trough,
There's nothing one can do
Save, perhaps, insert the snout,
While clenching tight the eyes
For, in this fashion, I was taught
To mitigate my sighs
The naughty lass was troubled now,
The Kraken was on top
And all that she could rightly do
Was bring it to a stop
'Oh, Nautilus! Come be my muse!'
The Kraken yelled, in vain
"Come don your silken dancing shoes!"
"Anęsthetise my brain!"
Its rabid use of punctuation
Stilled the roaring deep
And reversed the incantation
While the snuff was going cheap
The naughty lass was not amused,
Behind the cellar door
Where those of lender wisdom gazed,
On what had gone before
And commas stood for who knew what
And periods, unplanned,
Would interrupt the waking state
From Spain to Samarkand
Of those who knew the price of ale,
And valued it as little
As I some chicken in a sauce withal
Of cinnamon and spittle
She stamped her feet a dozen times
Her knees, a dozen more
As if to be beat out lusty themes
Unmapped on any score
And then, at once, she roared this threat:
"Anęsthetise your dream!
No move else shall spare the beat
Nor tape-record your scream ..."
At this the Kraken, wide asleep,
Dismissed the raging tide
And lit himself a soothing pipe
Of neat formaldehyde
No whit appeased, the lusty maid
OD'd on anaesthetic
And on a leafy bank was laid
In attitude pathetic
Thus the moral of this tale
Is masked by clumsy writing
(Not my own, which should prevail)
With verbs and pronouns fighting
Over hill, but yet not dale,
Through bracken, yet nor briar
That clings till shaken off with ale,
Or purged in cleansing fire
Thus, thus again, I rightly say
The moral of this fable
Is that the man who will eat hay
Must some day eat the table
He who poet most would be
Shall spurn nor pen nor pencil
And eat muffins cold for tea
With nary an utensil
For upright folk, the steeper path,
Grown steeper by the hour
We spent whilst in the bath,
Awaiting solar power
Is to perform anatomy
Upon a half-dead shrike
That had an apendectomy
While gorging on a pike
The suregon's hand must be quite still,
His pelvis quite at ease
Inside his trousers made of twill,
By various degrees
For, in this likeness of the truth,
He'll act his former age
And proposition frosty Ruth
Spreadeagled in her cage
She will rebuff him, with a stare,
All boiling on the brim
Of a straw boater, o so rare,
A gondolier so slim ...
And so, from this, the lesson's clear -
Or so I 'd like to think -
Sense is undervalued here
Where all dress up in mink
| Contributors: | Apsley, Surlaw, shipp, Shipp. |
| Poem finished: | 3rd October 2002. |