"Have One Anyway"
or Come on bare
Why, tell me why, do the Welshmen all repent?
Where, I asked them where, is all your money paid?
Who found the moral of the story, when it went
To make Litotes scarcely small, to scare Laetolus' maid?
This was the question on the burgomaster's lips
As he watched the passing staysails of 1000 countless yachts
Helen was his mistress, she who launched a million tips
Where Norwegians slag in Scotland while the helpless Welshman rots
In puddles in my liver where the cocker spaniels swim
I poured viscous yellow coffee till I'd filled it to the top
And when it fell, cascading, out of each and every limb
Why, the arms could not but wriggle, and the legs could not but hop.
Why, tell me who, made the collier's epic end?
How, tell me now, can I find my long lose aunt?
Where are the fragments, the pretty verses penned?
Where is the man who cried, "I can, I must, I shan't!"?
These were the findings of the Ombudsman of Rhyl:
Here are the writings of the dead man's final pome
"I was a miner, and miner am I still
I was a miner, but now I've come back home
Aged as an astronaut, illiterate as yet
I'm majoring primarily, a walrus for my room.
It bit my favourite plumber and embedded in the vet
A putrefying artefact from Montezuma's Tomb.?"
Humble Welsh illiterates - and what a feeble joke!
I've bought a brand new bandersnatch, a piglet in a sack.
My verse has got to finish now: contrite because Pembroke
We cannot quit this lay just yet, a punchline still we lack
Take that!
And scat!
If I were a cube of sugar so fine
I'd stay out on the tiles so late
I'd care not that the moon did shine
Like a luminous pea on the edge of my plate.
If I were a bowl of asparagoose soup
Like gorse seeds I'd blossom and crack well
I'd fly like vultures from their coop
Like tyrannous ogres attempting to smack a l-
Onely Beecham nut around she forest fire
Terminus! he cried. We knew he was a lawyer.
If I were a bunch of geraniums pink
I'd shun my lot in the windy box
I'd show them I know what to think
Unlike the disgusting gregarious phlox.
But hist! what varicose gardener through yonder greenhouse tramps
Switching off the gooseberries and switching on the lights
Pruning down the cabbages, and scaling all the heights
By sybaritic stairways, and ragamuffin ramps?
By what dark bloody maund'rings does he rouse the ire of vamps
Whose piano-playing sparkles like nothing in a jar?
The door's ajar - but there's nothing in that.
He scales a wall - in Wales a scrawl of- 'Scallywags are scamps'.
If I were a fish in a fishpond of gauze
I'd rush through the streets of the town on all fours
I'd dash in at windows, I'd rush out of doors
And seize all the wealth of the world in my jaws.
ENVOI
The jaws of despair sound the knell of my fate
At Jezebel's doors I am doomed to be late.
The Muse, alas, has left my mind a blank
And so my tale will be fabula rasa
I have no goddess now whom I may thank
My supernatural hopes all rest with NASA.
The prunes, alas, have left my body whole
And so no nurse can succour my digestion
I thank the doctor now with all my heart
But who will thank my heart? Aye, there's the question.
And who will dare to play the better part?
The leading role defeats all histrionics
The history of the enigmatic Vole
Reduces me to purposeless mnemonics.
The girl, alas, has left my feet awry,
My features turn to red and back to white
My feathers banked up far into the sky
I spent a most uncomfortable night.
A night so painful, so abstruse
My features turned from puce to puce
My feather bed took up the strain
And sieved my dreams; no more remain.
No Moors remain to tell this tail
Translate no envois into Braille
I feel a fool but cannot, fail
To mollify the Muse.
The Muse, alas, has left my mind a blank.