A Pretty Kettle of Poetry

Zippy Chorgle’s End

All olly-topped, the zippy freebed
With ogles in its chack
And then it tuttered by the worg
And orped beneath the clap.

Now, unbescotting to our ploff
A camanoogle hocks.
It’s piffing round the floofy jicks
And blonking round the sox.

And oh alas! It poops the zip
And timpers like a moosh
As meanwhile unbejugging pocks
The zip beneath the woosh.

The camanoogle corky licks
It’s pishy pallerclotts
And then it gammerpangs the zip
And flots its waller off.

And so no more the zippy blogs
And no more shall it gliff
Because the camanoogle plonks
With zippy in its wiff.

From Liqueur to Lace

Had worn her heart on a sleeve.
Had hid it when she’d had to grieve.
She’d cried for much less since
for every unworthy prince.

A moat of tears had flooded her moat.
Her draw-bridge had buckled under the messages she’d wrote.
One winter morn, the snow had settled, and lay
where she would a following summer’s day.

America loomed large, as Ireland became a speck
in the distance, and on deck.
She drank to the emerald isle
and fell asleep with a smile.

A grandmother she would be
over years and years, over that sea.
It may last for just a minute, or at its own pace
but if it’s the latter, fairy-tale tellers will veer from liqueur to lace.

Evacuation

The parents hug their children
While their children cry

As on the ship out of port
‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’

Grow up to be a good girl
And look after the little man.
And as she says those words
She lets go her little hand.

At the thought of that, she thinks her thoughts.
Years later, she lets go a sigh.
As a ship comes into port.
‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye.’

Glass

After bottles, vases and jars
Off they go to get smashed in pubs, discos and bars.
“If you blow it, that’s it, you see”
Confided one glass-blower.

The factory carried on
but survival wouldn’t be long.
Redundancies got higher
as productivity got lower.

Laid off workers sank
to the bottom of their bosses’ aquarium tank.
They cut it so fine
their once diamond vessel turned into a shipwreck that had lost its shine.

Finally, what was there from its beginnings was clearer.
How the coldness had been hidden behind an hysterically hyped up veneer.
A scientist opportunist conning peers.
A philanthropist grave-digger snatching moneyed sneers.

I’m not going to judge lest I be judged.
I’m not going to hold a grudge lest they begrudge.
Nor march to the next century to just trudge.
Nor pose for a still frame where to budge
Might mean blurring a Victorian image into muddy Georgian sludge.