The Granary Critic
your flagellant,
those slippery balms,
usurping and usurping and usurping these walls.
- now sound your tactical retreat! -
O how the the mice, flickshod
and burning, trip their dizzy intertrigo,
their rabid ears fructose poised
and manticore fleetfoot.
Your shivering hulk,
massaged.
Pirouetting dayglo bindweed cartwheels slipshod.
Then prizefighter Rosselini kicks the rushes,
which kick back, sukahara-referent,
(albeit with a steady beat, drumming,
on the coast-to-coast cat’s giant span, dirigible.)
: O who needs this?
What alms must we beg?
Why muzzle the firework when all diversions are signposted
so pointlessly?
and we just sit here
staring, glued, dripping,
prissily dormant but neatly segmented
as though this is the trick to tolerate.
But your mothless draught includer - how does it fare?
- no better or worse.
Do you need this?
Are you aware?
Back in the formative days the bell-nosed Kraut wore strides
and looked a treat in his bifocal ripcords,
but growing inside a stranger oven boiled,
stalactite crusted,
Polyanna hosepiped,
Tyrolean horsewhipped,
Cauliflower badelynged.
and all for the sake of a lentil
(or some other pulse).
Mark Welsh
View all poems by Mark Welsh