CAVALIER: May I skewer you with this pike?
ROUNDHEAD: Why, of course, dear sir, if you’d like.
CAVALIER: What am I thinking? Please, after you.
ROUNDHEAD: How very kind. Don’t mind if I do.
CAVALIER: Sorry about all my blood and guts.
ROUNDHEAD: That’s OK, it’s nothing much.
CAVALIER: You’ve just fired a musket in your head!
ROUNDHEAD: I thought I’d join you in being dead.
The only thing
Clive ever carried in his briefcase
Was a cheese and pickle sandwich.
Nothing unusual about that, perhaps,
But the other ants in the colony
Still regarded him
With suspicion.
few knew what lay in store
that Friday
it started (as such things always do)
with the haberdashers
where reckless price slashers
offered ten per cent off
cerise beading trimming
and soon the place
was full to brimming
as the prices lowered
the tension rose
resulting in a bloodied nose
by the children’s clothes
over in winter wear,
a couple of kerfufflers
turned to scufflers
over discounted mufflers
and there was more fighting
amongst the table lighting
as a shopper got lamped
and then put in the shade
there was carnage in the cardigans,
burnings in home furnishings,
a fracas near the nail lacquer
and a murderous mascara massacre
into luggage leaked mustard gas
and the worst case scenario
came to pass
thirty-five shoppers malled to death
who lost their lives in the fray,
the casualties of consumption
to be remembered on Black Friday
the night Greg
summoned up the courage
to deliver his carefully prepared speech
to Sandra,
he was nervous,
declaring that he would
climb the deepest oceans
and swim the highest mountains
to be at her side
when Sandra laughed at him
and pointed out his mistake,
Greg fled and did not leave
his bedroom for ten days
the next time he saw her
Sandra was seeing Steve Glover
whom she subsequently was to marry
six years later, though,
Greg was to have the last laugh
when he became the first man
to swim breaststroke
across Mount Kilimanjaro
the grammar police got him
split his infinitive open,
removed his colon
and left him lying commatose
the next day he was pronouned dead
full stop
she was sick
of seeing Keith
playing with it
any opportunity
he would whip it out,
like a magician
producing a bunch
of plastic flowers
from under a gaudy silk scarf
for an audience
long since inured to ennui
she imagined
it was the weight of it
in his hand
that appealed,
as an assassin,
creeping up the staircase,
finds reassurance
in his revolver
the evening when her parents
came over for dinner,
she could tell
Keith was fiddling with it
under the table
from his glassy-eyed look
of distracted concentration
the fidgeting, the fudgeting,
the fingering, the lingering looks
he gave it when he wasn’t holding it,
(looks he never gave her anymore)
depressed her,
pushed her buttons
that Christmas, in desperation,
she bought him a phone
and he never played with it again
we sought other delights
as Wuthering Heights
had really started to bore us
but my Penguin Classic
went all Jurassic
when Emily Brontesaurus
returning to his old school,
Roy vanquished
childhood warnings
by running up and down
the corridor
with scissors in his hand
and, so doing, liberated himself
from the burden
of conformity
he did this for twenty-six seconds
before the tiger got him
No-one could press a shirt
Like Percy Bysshe Shelley.
It said in a programme
I saw on the telly.
He would flatten with flair
Like a hero Byronic,
Which I guess you could say
Is a little ironic.
She came to see the wall
He’d built between them,
Using box sets for bricks,
As a metaphor for their marriage.
It was just like a proper wall, though,
As he had a lot of box sets
(Although he was still waiting
For Colin Coombs from accounts
To return season three of Game of Thrones).
Brian Bilston's Poetry Laboetry 