Wasting energy

I don't get many commissions, apart from family occasions, so when my supervisor in work asked me to do him "a funny poem on energy conservation in the home," I though I'd give it a lash. No idea what he wants it for, though. Should really have asked him.


You’d come down in fine fettle
And fill up the kettle
To make one cup of tea for yourself.
With a nonchalant skill,
You’d throw bread on the grill,
With the toaster unused on the shelf.
The fridge door, then, sloppily,
Would not be shut properly
And the motor would quicken its pace,
Then you’d hit the dishwasher
And hear the suds slosh a-
-Round all of the wide open space.

You’d think it amazing
You’d no double-glazing
As the heat escaped out through the cracks.
Your electrical heater
Put pounds on the meter,
Not to mention the twelve per cent tax.
A good lagging jacket
Did not cost a packet
But your boiler stood naked and numb,
And you’d stand in the shower
For nearly an hour
And dream of the good times to come.

On standby, the telly
Still gave the grid welly
At night while you slept in your bed.
And the CFL lighting,
You did not find exciting
And you’d stick with the old bulbs, you said.
Your letter-box rattled
And fruitlessly battled
With the wind that blew up our drive way.
And I found it quite stunning
You’d leave the tap running
When brushing your teeth night and day.

You knew that your attic
Was quite problematic
With the heat seeping out through the roof.
But you simply said ‘Shag it,
Its too hard to lag it,’
And waited till you had more proof.
Oh mother, you’re old now
And feeling the cold now
And complain you’re alone and bereft.
But you know that its true, mam,
Its all down to you, mam,
That the world has no energy left.

On holidays in Galway 1999

(I was going through my folders of family history files today when I came across this, presumably written during our holiday in Spiddal in 1999!)

With nowhere special left to go,
We drove around to Carraroe.
We didn’t see the waterfalls,
Just rocks and rain and lakes and walls.

Gortumna Island our next stop
To try and find an ice-cream shop.
Instead of ice-cream cones and flakes,
We’d walls and rocks and rain and lakes.

Then we drove on to Rosmuck,
Just, I said, to have a look,
But all we found there once again
Were lakes and walls and rocks and rain.

Exasperated at the wheel,
I headed back to Rossaveal
But all we saw, down round the docks
Were rain and lakes and walls and rocks.

A close shave

I hit her quite squarely on the N34,
She came down awful hard on my bonnet.
I slammed on the brakes most determinedly for
I could not see a thing with her on it.

She lay in a puddle, her fur coat around her,
Like a bruised and a battered ham sandwich.
I was sorry to learn that the water had drowned her
But at least my car suffered no damage.

Edgar Allan Poe says Thank You

My unsuccessful entry in Martin Parker's light verse competition for Issue 8 of Lighten up Online. The theme was to have a famous writer in history respond to receiving a modern gadget as a present - maximum 16 lines. http://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/Issue_8/Poems/Competition_8.htm - for the winning entries.

I thank you for this mobile phone, sir,
With its dreary ringing tone, sir,
Though ‘tis true, I have to own, sir,
That I know not what it’s for.

Despite its self-proclaimed mobility,
Sadly, it lacks real agility,
Sitting silent in tranquility
In the shadows ‘pon the floor.

Can one use it in a duel?
Or is’t a type of fossil fuel?
Or maybe some strange-lustred jewel
Hewn from Lethe’s darkened shore?

Was it cast o’erboard by seamen
For it housed some deathly demon
That, when mortal souls were dreamin’,
Crept forth with a ghastly claw?

Diana Ross

Diana Ross was at a loss
To what she should do next.
She hadn’t thought her day in court
Would leave her so perplexed.
In her denial, she said the trial
Was one almighty fudge.
She said “I feel I must appeal
To the Supreme Court judge.”

RSI

The mother of Thackeray Ponsonby-Twyst
Suffered repetitive strain to the wrist
She got it, she claimed, to Judge Rory O’Carroll,

Through writing his name out on his school apparel

On arriving at Philadelphia airport

Down the steps of the plane we descended
But tarmac was not what we found.
Cream cheese! Oh, delicious and splendid,
Was spread two feet thick on the ground.

Flight US792

The flight was very long and very boring,
The screaming child was getting on my goat.
The large, obese man next to me was snoring.
I had a sudden urge to slit his throat.

I tried to go to sleep through self-hypnosis
After spending forty minutes counting sheep.
But all I got was slight deep-vein thrombosis
When just my feet and legs were put to sleep.

Voice from the grave

Here I lie beneath this stone,
Quite unattended and alone.
No-one’s ever shed a tear
Since they first interred me here.
The wood surround that marks this plot
Long, long ago began to rot
And now lies broken, badly splintered.

Yes, two hundred years I’ve wintered
In this corner ‘neath the yew
That blocks the morning sunlight’s view.
The clay is cold, the weeds like thick,
The autumn comes around too quick.
How many long-forgotten bones
Rot silently beneath these stones?

I do not have for company
The wife and children dear to me
For, victim of tradition’s slave,
They occupy another grave,
Where still they moan and bitch and bawl,
Because I murdered one and all.

I turned a blind eye

I turned a blind eye to her smoking,
I turned a blind eye to her men.
I turned a blind eye
When she drank the bar dry
Again and again and again.

I turned a blind eye to her spending
Though the bills came to more than I earned,
And when she slipped in the rain
Right in front of that train,
I kept my blind eye roundly turned.

(Not submitted to BAFFLE - see post below!)

The Ballad of Isaiah Turner

Pretty thrilled about this one. I actually won the Baffle Bard festival organised by those wonderfully hospitable people down in Loughrea. A brilliant competition, highly recommended to all! The theme for this year's competition was Turn a Blind Eye

Isaiah Turner’s dead and buried,
Across the Styx his soul’s been ferried,
With his glass eye in its socket,
Hidd’n by neither patch nor pad.
He’d take it out, dear friends and mourners,
And claim that he could see round corners,
And sometimes put it in his pocket
Just to see what change he had.

When he was but a tiny sparrow-
-Fart, a kid with bow and arrow
Struck him square as he was playing
In his garden with his brother.
When he came home, glass eye staring,
Local kids, with wit and daring,
Nicknamed him Isaiah, saying
“One Isaiah’s than the other.”

But in time, he found that gettin’ a-
-Long with but a single retina
Wasn’t half as bad as being
Short an arm or leg or head.
And though his zero: twenty vision
Occasionally invoked derision,
Still, it didn’t stop him seeing
The funny side of what they said.

He eyed a neighbour of his uncle
And sang to her like Art Garfunkel,
Crooning in a soft voice that he
Only had one eye for her.
And then, when he’d been merely blinking,
She had thought that he’d been winking,
Which led to himself and Hattie
Having an affaire de coeur.

On honeymoon, above in Norway,
Hattie got stuck in a doorway
And only after hours of shoving,
Did he force his wife outside.
Breathlessly, he gave a snigger,
Eying her quite ample figure,
Adding, with a lot of loving,
“It doesn’t pay to be too wide.” (two-eyed)

Back home, alas, he had to pull back
From his job as rugby fullback
When the opposition spotted
He was merely single-eyed.
For every time he kept his eyeball
On each tantalising high ball,
The other team, with great guile, plotted
To take him out on his blind side.

Forgoing sport, Isaiah Turner
Got a handy little earner
As nightwatchman on a really
Come-and-get-me building site.
In his hut, he sat there sleeping
Till the daylight hours came creeping,
One eye shut and one eye steely,
Gazing out into the night.

People used to slip him money,
Which he thought was really funny,
As they could have simply purloined
Anything they liked for free.
“Turner Blind Eye” someone called him,
Which, he knew well, should have galled him,
But he liked his rump steak surloined
And he favoured Earl Grey tea.

At length, although he was indicted,
His plea of being semi-sighted,
So impressed the judge and jury
They bade him go with God’s good grace.
His former boss, beset by creditors,
Telephoned the tabloid editors,
Berating with almighty fury
The “cock-eyed verdict” in this case.

He turned a blind eye when his Hattie
Met a man with Maserati,
Not caring to uphold her honour
As most husbands tend to do.
And as she crossed the street one morning,
Did he yell a frantic warning
As the truck bore down upon her?
No, he turned a blind eye too.

But Isaiah grew despondent,
Told the Reuters correspondent
That he prayed to heaven nightly
To release him from this strife.
He felt the stigma, felt disfigured,
Hurt when silly schoolboys sniggered
At his glass eye, so unsightly.
Thus in pain, he took his life.

And if, in Paradise, St. Peter
Has to go and check the meter,
Let’s hope he does not choose Isaiah
To watch o’er those Pearly Gates.
For “Turner Blind Eye’s” bound to let in
Every foul or hare-brained cretin
Who was destined for the fire
But can pay the going rates.

Ivy

It was an old deserted mansion
That had undergone expansion,
Since it first had been constructed years ago.
On the now-abandoned stable,
Ivy hung down from the gable,

But why she killed herself, we’ll never know.

The Mountains of Thrude

It’s considered quite rude
In the Mountains of Thrude
To dip your chest into the soup.
Some bores raise guffaws,
But the strict social laws
Say it’s not the done thing in a group.

Soup-dipping’s a no-no
For chests. Men cry “Oh no!
Please get your chest out of the broth!
For up here in Thrude,
It’s considered quite rude
And has often engendered much wrath.”

Marie Antoinette

“Let them eat cake,”
Was a dreadful mistake,
When the peasants were pleading for bread.
But much worse, by far,
Was the fashion faux pas
On the day that they cut off her head.

‘Pon the feared guillotine,
The sartorial queen
Didn’t take her black dress to her grave.
Instead, she wore white,
An incongruous sight
That the peasantry never forgave.

My country and western song

You didn’t rinse your wine glass; you just left it by the sink,
The bright magenta lipstick stains the rim.
You gulped the wine down quickly when I offered you a drink
And then rushed out the door to be with him.

Somewhere I imagine you are sipping your champagne,
His large hand resting lightly on your knee.
Your laughter flows like bubbles and dispels the summer rain,
The way it did when you would drink with me.

The vineyard has been ravaged by the worm of discontent,
The grapes lie small and withered on the vine.
I stand among the blackened leaves and wonder where it went
And why the sun decided not to shine.

So now I sit here sadly with the semblance of a frown,
Self-pity and great sorrow unconfined.
The wine has turned to vinegar but still I gulp it down
And hope that it will drive you from my mind.

But still I see the wine glass and its lipstick bright and red,
Laughing at me from the kitchen sink.
And though my mind is hazy, I can’t drive it from my head,
And so I reach out for another drink.

The theatre loving motor car

The theatre loving motor car buys tickets for the shows,
And can be found at many curtain calls.
The tourists are intrigued and turn round in the front rows
When he goes up to the balcony and stalls.

On Flying

Despite the fact that aeroplane’s keep crashing,
Despite that they keep falling out the sky,
Despite the way the warning lights keep flashing,
Flying’s still the safest way to fly.

The queues for Ryanair

Oh, why is it important to be first upon the plane,
Especially for a fifty minute flight?
Why do people feel the need to go through all that pain?
They really make a very sorry sight.

The moment that the gate’s announced, they start to form a queue,
Not wanting to relax and wait a bit.
They stand there for an hour or more before the plane is due,
Determined that they choose their place to sit.

Perhaps they feel its vital that they get a lovely view
Of all the shagging clouds that line the route?
Or maybe it is simply that they like to form a queue,
Though frankly I would not call it a hoot.

What the hell’s the point in booking short haul flights priority
When everyone is guaranteed a seat?
But more and more, I fell that I am in a small minority,
Although I find the logic incomplete.

Another Millennium poem

We stood in the garden as midnight grew nearer,
Some had champagne while me Gran had Madeira.
Not many witness a change of millennia
And so, round the world, from Caracas to Kenya,
In every village and every town,
We waited to count those last ten seconds down.

Then, all of a sudden, Aunt Liz let a scream
(Which fitted in well with the carnival theme)
And started to kick her left foot in the air,
Which caused all our nephews and nieces to stare.
“Is that how you danced,” asked young Will with a smile,
“When Handel and Bach were the top of the pile?”

But ‘twas not a dance that Aunt Liz was performing,
But trying to escape from some black insects swarming
All over her shoes and ascending her tights,
Seemingly fearless of scaling great heights.
“I wouldn’t be in their shoes,” said bold cousin Bert,
On viewing them starting to nose up her skirt.

Where they had appeared from was anyone’s guess
But soon they had doubled Aunt Liz’s distress,
And everyone squeezed in our small plastic torch,
While Dad bathed the garden in light from his torch.
Then Grandad began to scratch at his bald head
“Oh Lord, we are all being eaten!” he said.

Black insects, black insects, we slapped at our trousers
While neighbours peered fearfully out from their houses,
Till Dad got a hosepipe and, in a wild panic,
Shot out more water than sunk the Titanic,
And yes, it worked well for the insects all drowned,
A thousand black corpses strewn cross the green ground.

Alas! We’d forgotten to count down the clock,
But we were all freezing and somewhat in shock,
It seemed as if we’d been caught out in the rain
As we stood around sipping our watery champagne.
Then Mam kicked one slowly and motioned to Doug
“Is this what they call the Millennium bug?”

To the postal assistant in Blanchardstown Post Office

Oh how I wish that I possessed
Your sense of laissez-faire,
That attitude of ‘sod the rest,’
That look of ‘do I care?’

The queue was half a mile long,
The mood was not that great,
A silent, disenchanted throng,
Like cattle at a gate.

Six hatches were not manned at all,
Just three were trying to cope.
The queue was moving at a crawl,
The damned, devoid of hope.

And then we saw ‘Position Closed’
Go up before your face.
‘Toilet break,’ we all supposed.
‘Go swiftly, with God’s grace.’

But no, you reached down to your bag
With most indecent speed,
And, taking out a gossip mag,
You then began to read.

You crunched an apple as you flicked
Right through that magazine
And, using your small finger, picked
Your nose till it was clean.

Meanwhile, evil mutt’rings grew
On our side of the fence
And violent thoughts were hurled at you
With blazing eyes intense.

But no, you carried on as if
You didn’t have a care,
Oblivious to the acrid whiff
Of anarchy in the air.

Every night, my prayers go flying,
Asking, if I may,
That I can come across you, dying,
After some affray.

And I’d produce a magazine
While you lie comatose,
And sit and read it, as I clean
The inside of my nose.
.