POSH GAMMON

I like to lie in bath of luke warm water,

Reading The Spectator.

It’s so well written, it’s so right wing,

It wants the empire back,

It’s for people who own things.

And when the mad Russians come,

And The Spectator says they will.

And drop their naughty bomb,

I’m going to die in my bath,

Reading the Truth,

When the fireball rolls,

I’m going to boil like bacon,

Charred paper in my hand,

The last leisured remnant

Of a dead civilisation.

AUTOBIOGODRIVEL

I started to write my autobiography, then,

I sneezed, and sneezed, and sneezed again.

I blew out onto the page words and memories,

And, probably, tiny particles of my brain.

So, I have assembled this miscellany,

From the stains that remained.

I am an unpleasant peasant pedant,

And an excited observer of ants,

A wiper of damp patches;

I miss the taste of postage stamps.

Once I had a god-given omen,

An eagle’s feather floating down from a clear sky,

It fell at my feet silently,

And I just walked on by.

I stack volumes on shelves,

Suck up dust with a machine.

My only traditional is breakfast,

But I am averse to beans.

And not one word of this matters,

Or means very much at all,

As I’m an atom in an atom in an atom,

On a cosmic billiard ball.

GENETIC DETERMINISM

Sitting on the shitter,

Wrestling in my bowels

And in my brain,

With constipation

And existential exasperation:

I seek enlightenment from the pages

Of a scientific publication

And the words inscribed

In this in slim tome

Seek to educate its readers

About the human genome.

Why are we bipedal?

Why aren’t we hirsute?

How can we make tools?

From where did we migrate?

And why do we uniquely,

Unlike our cousin apes,

Make this thing called language,

With which to communicate?

And the scientists say,

As scientists tend to do,

That it’s all down to a gene,

One they call Fox P2.

So I go out into the garden,

To digest this information,

In a suburban situation;

When a urban fox passes by,

It gives me a foxy look,

With its foxy eye

And as if the give the science

A feral peer review

And show that the research was accurate,

This canine decides to micturate

So it was then that I knew,

That the genetics were all true

This confirmed,

When the fox peed too.