CLEARING THE DESK (© Words by Paul F Cowlan)

CLEARING THE DESK (© Words by Paul F. Cowlan)

Clearing the deks,
(sententious transposition of the ‘k’ and ‘s’), I found,
beneath sered ledgers, tax demands and palimpsests,
a musket ball,
addressed by Vicky in her salad days
on strict Balmoral note-heads
to a firm of bondage specialists in old Cheapside,
enquiring primly about whalebone stays.
Doctor (Sam.) Johnson had replied, anachronistically,
in Athole-brose, scrawled boustrophedon on a crinoline.

‘Madam .....

You know his kind of prose;
too quotable by half, but grand and equipoised.

.....a bottom of good sense is commonly admired.
..........’diasniag llew reven eutriv latnemadnuf A

The usual stuff, assured and gruffly voiced.
Enough’s enough. I’ll knock it on the head.

Next came a Polaroid of Raleigh at Daytona Beach,
and grumpy semaphore’s from Rex at Holyrood.
"Och Wally, hirple hame an’ gi’ me haed,
y’r Orinoco beans and Spanish Clap."
With other such salacious pap,
but that is roughly what it said.

Tuskers from Carthage butted out,
with cheap-returns to Trasimene
and Chian wine,
a job-lot I suppose,
‘Return to sender’ scribbled on the spout.
‘Hissarlik. (Level III)’
But no-one now knew who the sender was.

"It will refresh us on the train."
one pachyderm enthused, in husky tucket Tuareg.
I don’t recall his name.
But none of this was erudite enough,
lacking a dull moon’s Erse obscurities.
From under Prince Shotoko’s ‘History of Japan,’
and drowning out his plaintive samisen,
a tipsy corranach gave jaw.

"Whisht!
Y’r man an’ Ann Macleary,
whisked out of a coal scuttle,
dubbing the middling dock-tailed islet
where swine are courteously yondered."

Nunc gaudere!
Now balding polymaths rejoyce,
and winkle out that old Danaan,
or surreptitiously break wind about his namesake.
Go ye to it!
For none speak fleeringly of Twrch here.

(That slips your snide Arthurian porky in
- cryptic invagination with the beaver up -
via red and white Welsh rare-bits,
twin-tone bunkum of Hermaphrodite
and dragons in a pit-stop),

And thus you re-arrive,
by one way and an uther,
and a commodius ficus,
at

‘Rex quondam. Rexque Futurus.’

Man!

Scuff up the bookwoods. Pile the quires.
Manqué Yankee style:
‘Persevere!’

‘Od’s socks!
This could go on for ever!