Look serious in
A and E
Like you're making history
All that's
decent you can shreddit
Shift the blame and take the credit
Increase deniability
By lying with sincerity
Play the joker
have a laugh
Posing for a photograph
There was no
party, wasn't me
I was in the lavatory!
For a country
based on greed
Eton boys are what you need
Tug you
forelock, bend your knee
When you give your vote, you see
Getting rich is
the first rule
Not for you,for me you fool
That summer I upped my skills, big time
My similes were giving me grief
So I hunted down fresh imagery
Like a spear hunter on a coral reef
Each morning, in the dark, was a victory
knocking new poems out of the park
My rhyming couplets were legendary
See, I had an awareness of the wider game
Allegory, allusiion, alliteration
Litotes – he plays for Leicester City
I was flying, bruv. No one could catch
me
One day, a scout knocks on the door
And asks to see my mum and dad
He says he’s heard about this lad
Who is subverting poetry, could he have look?
Maybe there was a place for me in a new book
It was a really exciting anthology
I still have to practice my keepy-uppy
To get to this level, you don’t go gently
Now I am driving a brand new Bentley
What would it be like without Lineker
The gladiator turned commentator?
The stifled cries of caged animals
Gave the restless crowd no answer.
The blue lid of the roofless arena
Was an empyrean. A vulture circled
Lazily. The bird was in no hurry.
Scavengers do not honour the dead.
A painted sign intrigued those who were there
‘Enjoy Walkers crisps’, it said.
The ball was pleasingly spherical –
Certainly an improvement on last year.
Eleven players a side, all human
Covered the field of play effectively.
Their movements were graceful.
A small, wiry man, more agile than the rest
Weaved like a shuttle, in intricate patterns.
He was the best. The crowd groaned
As a javelin pierced his chest.
Time was stretched. The crowd held its breath.
A sabre flashed. His severed head
Dropped neatly to the floor.
The astonished crowd breathed out.
Its sigh curdled into a blood roar.
Grace had been shown in death.
Honour had been satisfied.
As the bronzed Linker would have said
If he had been there.
Only blue and red of the arena
Would satiate them today.
The vulture, an eye’s blink away
Caught the rising scent of fresh gore.
We hunted for rabbits and squirrels
with homemade bows and arrows.
We realised that we could live on nettles
and what grew in the hedgerows.
We abolished any vegetable
that was not textureless or bland.
Why had we never acknowledged
the excellence of British food?
Proud that we were free of foreign influence
We wound back time to before the Romans
But why stop there? It was the land bridge
that had caused the ingress of foreigners
with their strange and exotic diets
their laws, languages and farming.
Soon we would grub in the dirt for worms
a proud people, our dignity restored.
