Anything Goes

[penguin]

One must imagine a miserable Sisyphus
rolling a stone that’s expanding with impetus –
making mountains out of molehills, I suppose.

She was a seasonal beast who slept through the summer;
I checked pockets and sleeves to flesh out the drama
and discovered that she hadn’t any clothes

apart from the bruises on leaves and on clouds,
the subtle contusions and those screaming loud
as the hammer is brought down upon the toes.

As each winter yawned she stretched and then started
to rewrite A History of The Antarctic
in twenty-seven different types of snows.

On our French rendezvous she performed ingénue
insisting that Seamus can rhyme with Camus
and poetry be chiselled out of prose.

Her favourite vice, the pastime of choice
was to gaze on the ocean while reading James Joyce
until the passage when she found the waters froze.

At her wheel in the attic she spun Mathematics,
spoon feeding crack addicts – why not let ‘em have it?
The law of averages says most will overdose.

In The Oedipal Complex she danced with each sex –
an arm in a sling and a ball on her legs -
to the rhythm of a million status quos.

Wearing the wide-brimmed hat and a paisley cravat,
she craved a moustache but couldn’t grow that:
she never saw what lay beneath her nose.

She’s done dined and supped with Beelzebub
then thrown it all up, that ain’t healthy but
it’s the going rate for alternate egos.

In her last book she slipped into Cyrillic script –
for a snip you can lift the lid off a crypt
if you wish to watch a body decompose.

I’ve trawled the search engines you might find a friend in –
I can’t find my penguin, there’s no happy ending:
they all look much the same without their clothes.

Anything goes.