THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS

We left no stone unturned.
What were we hunting for in those dark, smelly, empty tombs?
Were we looking for your lost mummy?
All the other mummies were somewhere else too,
Making an exhibition of themselves in the big city.
There wasn't so much as the smell of a mummy.

Yours was the miserable snuffle
Of the pig who finds no truffle,
Only a few dusty, highly toxic
Serpents, cockatrices, scorpions,
That sort of thing.
Call this a holy day, young Piggles!
I said. I’ve known more fun reposing
On my bed of nails.

You were really miserable,
Suffering the pangs, the anguish,
The agony, the torture, the torment.
The slings, the arrows
Of altogether the wrong kind of mummy.

Did that valley once full of very
Dead kings
Remind you of how
Death
Seems to scoot along in your family?
Maybe, maybe not.
In any case, Your proclivity
To be
literally
sickened by it all
Was manifested
Yet again.

THE FISH

Who was the saint who sent us fishing?
Was it that joker, Peter, bless him?
We – you and me, Piggles – standing
Ungrammatically on Africa,
Doomed to disappointment,
Angling for discomfiture,
As per usual,
Watching our piteous
Float float
Down the excrementitious,
More laxative, surely, than astringent,
Nile River.

Were you still with me when,
Against national
Loddery otts, no, not so much national
Loddery otts, more national
Lottery odds
I caught
The fish,
Or had you already wandered off to wallow
In the all too literal mire?
We took it back in a jam-jar,
The fish not the mire,
To show to the holy bimbi,
Mimi, Fifi, Fatima, Laura with the aura &.co.
All saints, bless them.
It certainly was an underwhelming fish,
An exiguous, shrivelled, rubbery, flexile tiddler.
Little Saint Lolita, bless her,
Fed it to the convent cat.

You laughed!
The only time I caught you at it.
No, really you did.
A kind of unrhythmical, spasmodic squeak.
Still echoing now you’re doornail
Dead and ingested
Mostly.

THE BIRD

Remember that candyfloss,
Nilotic sunset and the frog devouring bird
With the bright black eyes
And the long gracile legs?
No Piggles,
Not little Saint Mimi of the petticoats, bless her.

Step by step. beside it,
I stalked, storked even,
Copying its stilted strides,
Knees swinging from the hips.
While you, on your four pretty
Trotters, pink all the way up,
Lolloped alongside
Perfecting the lurch of our humpy, defective
Camel

The pink Sphinx,
Watching our progress,
Our two, three, four legged funny walks,
Might have been thinking,
Or not.
Who can ever,
Ever know?

Weeks later, munching a
Bacon sandwich,
(O Ali, take away this sauce.
It’s much too sanguine. Have you nothing browner?)
I recalled our incomplete camel’s three
And that hungry bird’s two
And, not
Least, at least
One
Of your delectable
Dainty legs.

THE LITERARY LIFE

Hildegard of Bingen cruised in,
Great saint, bless her!, great poet!
Herself a luxury-liner, nun better!
Doing the Nile with the Herrenvolk.
Her face, a Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte mit Sahne
On a big white dish. We waved
And climbed the narrow companionway
To a , well!,
Seen one, seem them all,
A nun’s cabin,
Crumpled sheets, fag-ends, empty gin bottles,
More littery than literary.
Sieg heil, Hildchen!, she did not smile,
I showed her some of my best poems,
Really good ones.
Her voice, the dithyramb of an impaled herring-gull:
Who wrote these then, Tonio,
You or your pinky fat friend?
It was you she meant, Piggles.
I took the point of that ‘who wrote these?’
You took the point of that ‘pinky fat friend’.
You squeaked
And tipped yourself out off her
Bun’s nunk. No, not so much
Bun’s nunk, Piggles,
More
Nun’s bunk.
I grabbed back my really good poems.
Fat yourself, sister! The rapier wit struck home.
I carried you down,
Shivering, shaking, squealing,
Pathetic as per usual,
To our quotidian cuddle.

Later, when you were very
Dead, Piggles,
A postcard made its long journey
From the Vaterland.
Hildegard thanking me for the Schinken.
Nice pig, Tony! she wrote.
It was you she meant,
Piggles baby.

2 CROCODILE CLOSE

Saint Thomas Cook, bless him, came by
Pyramid selling.
Need some holy days Tony?
Can you doubt it, Thomas?
One holy week, selfcatering, El Giza,
Nice cave, pets welcome,
Convent of the Holy Bimbi
Netball team of none but
Nuns, all saints bless ‘em, just up the road,
Caravan at your disposal, well, not so much a
Caravan,
More a camel.

Wonnit?
We wanted it and, to quote the poet,
We got it!

2, Crocodile Close,
One more poetical address for those sic
Pigrims, Piggles. Number two too,
Even
More poetic than number one. Twice as poetic perhaps and not so
Odd.
2 Crocodile Close, I said
But not too crocodile close, Eh Piggles?
You did not smile, which was expected.

We rolled up and rolled in
To my black sack, you and I.
I was holy in my holey nightshirt.
You were wobbling and bubbling for a change.
We cuddled
A lot. You were my cuddly, wobbly, bubbly Piggles.

O yes and then?
How did we come to walk our camel too crocodile close
At sunset by the Nile River?
The crocodile smiled.
She wept her fabled perfidious tears
And then she bit off our camel’s best leg.

It made me think about death
A lot and made me think that you were thinking about death
A lot too and made me think
The inscrutable, sunset pink Sphinx, was thinking about death
A lot too.
But then who ever
Ever knows what the
Pinx phinx thinx,
Piggles?

CHILD'S PLAY

What for, in the name of it’s father,
Did you need to savage
Young Brigid’s baby?
As if being a single mother wasn’t trouble enough
For a nice, redheaded, Irish girl,
And her a long way from home
And a saint too, bless her.
Life is bad enough, Tony,
Without little Gerry being pignipped
Under the table
Whenever I come by?
It’s enough to try the patience.
She said,

Your homicidal fury had to be quenched.
I spared the Guinness and fetched the fire-bucket.
She clasped the wretched, once bitten child
to her fetching bosom.

You were soaked to the core of your Inferno.
You breathed water.

Next time some blessed ginger baby
Wants to play with your curly tail,
You just close your nippy mouth
And your piggy eyes
And think of Nubia, okay?
You squeaked but not in reply,
Which was what I expected.
Perhaps you already knew in your
Coggles, Pickles. No!, not so much
Coggles Pickles
More
Cockles, Piggles,
That there would be no next time.

THE BLUE SUEDE SHOES

I should never have taken you to that Easter hop.
I thought all was okay with your life.
I took you for grunted.
You were the skateboard I glided on,
Psychedelic pink,
Horizontal and generally low-slung.
God had made you speedy and plump
And fun on Sundays.
I should have known
Saint Elvis, bless him, and his Blue Suede Shoes
Would pull in the cave-crashers.
They swarmed like hopping locusts
Down from the rocks, as squiffy as bishops.
It seemed a good way to spend a holy day.
The Cavern was sardine-packed
Sonorous with a sounder of saints when they,
Nightshirts to the wind,
Tiddly, stinko, blotto, sozzled,
Came marching in.

For you it was a horror
Of pounding, apostolic
Naked feet.
Your snout turned green,
Your curly tail seemed pathetically tiny
And everyone remarked on the prophecy
Of your hope-you-don’t-mind torn ear.
You looked to hide but I saw you,
Coward (sic) (very sic) in a corner.
I saw the pathetic pigling who wanted nobody to dance,
The lonely pigling who too soon would be

Sausages &co.

FLOUNDERS

Was that a happy day?
Fishing for flounders from Felix’s felucca.
Felix, Fisher of Fish and Flora the Wise,
Saints both, bless them!,
Laid on a holy day for us at the seaside.
We sunned on their sand but that was no novelty
And collected crabs’ carapaces
Or shells,
A saint may choose.
Let’s go fishing for flounders! said Felix,
Right you crazy felucca! Let’s do it!
( Wise Flora waved us goodbye.)
We rowed and rowed.
We anchored off and shared a fag.
A boat came by
Out of Alex, full of pigrims (very sic)
We boiled in its wake’s bobble.
You wobbled plaintively in the sheets,
Less pink than usual and ill at ease
While Felix and I showered you with
A gleaming shot-blue, sheen-green hail of dappled arrows wrenched
From the gloom-rich depths.
We flung onto your rubbery bum
Holy mackerel! A miraculous draught!
Like Guinness! Felix said.
How we laughed!
It would be fun to find some flounders, Felix.
Mostly mackerel here, old mucker!
But fishing for flounders was what you said, Felix.
So alright! Okay! Yes!
Feluccing fishing for feluccing flounders
That’s what I feluccing said.
Just write me down
As an apostolical alliteration-addict, alright?
We laughed some more as a few million
Mackerel hit the bottom boards.

Me, I was so happy I could have walked on water.
You, looked a bit pathetic,
As per usual.

CRYSTAL GAZING

Adulf had only got one
crystal ball.
He peddled it round the caves,
passed among us saints, bless us!,
muttering his Zauberspruch,
Hocus Pocus Fidibus!
(Hau ab Adulf!)
And set up by the barber’s shop.
Roll up!, roll up!
To be bamboozled and hornswoggled.

Now and again though, he got it right,
Foretold the odd martyrdom,
Upside down crucifixion,
Sideways ditto,
Oil-boil, wheel-break,
Red hot poker up the backside,
Disembowelling,
And once the winning camel
In the King’s Cup at Luxor.

You were the pigling who wanted to know
Too much. You clambered up to gaze,
Your pink eyes blazing.
Well!, blinking rather than blazing.
Would you see the cold ham bones
Embedded in your hot body?
I disapproved.
I grabbed your plump rubber bum.
For your own sake.
I floored you, squeaking.

Alas! I should have known,
You had only to see your self
Mirrored in my big, shiny frying-pan
To know your whole Fate.

THE JERBOA

Hippity-hop!
Down hopped the woolly jumper of the sandhills,
Tickling the telamons’ toes
With her tail,
The jolly jerboa, disorientated,
Was heading for our cave like she’d been invited
For supper.
I reached for my tucker-bag and whistled
Waltzing Matilda.
The bright-eyed yellow rat studied me -
Me, I, me, ?
- A drooling saint who sees both kinds of locust too often,
And not a lot else.
She did not hang about.
They never do, I find. I’ve yet to bake
One in a pie.
Hippity hop! back up the sandhills
Not stopping even to thumb her nose.
You were impressed. I watched you
Flex the metatarsals in your hind
Legs, test your toes.
My six-month pigling was suddenly the jerboa
That could not jump.
I whistled nonchalance.
You eyed my tucker-bag
As I eyed you.

WITTERING HEIGHTS

Monica came by with her boy.
Hail Augustus!
Tin not tus and a bishop now, she said.
Mitre done worse, I said, but no-one smiled.
He made his adolescent self at home,
Slumped in my favourite chair,
Gaiters on the coffee table,
Phrygian cap front to back,
Picked you up and bounced you on his
Purple episcopal knee,
Tickled your snout,
Lit his own snout
But did not offer,
Made our cave his ashtray.
I saw red but you
Were tickled pink.
They gave our Gus a desmond,
In Carthaginian Rhetoric, you should hear him spout.
Said Monica.
He can effervesce like the rhubarb wine
That you do not possess.
Yes sir! Holy mackerel! she dusted his dalmatic,
To what Elysian heights can our Gus not witter!!
I found them a can or two of Irn Bru.
Let’s hear him then!
He’s a bit shy.
They stayed an hour. She had brought her knitting.
I swear young Gus never spoke a word until,
Maybe next time, she said in leaving.
Yeah! said the boy bishop, stroking your tender spot,
Yeah, maybe next time Tony baby!
With that the rising rhetorician helped
Himself to our last carob.
I was singed by a flaming, fluted flambeau of fury.
Only gradually to be quenched
At good old Ali’s.

A PINK PLASTIC PIG

Who was it gave us that pink plastic pig?
Some holy joker.
A likeness that just failed.
Not pretty pink like you, Piggles, shocking rather,
Unnipped unnubian.
You did not like it.
I did not like it. That made two of us.
What possessed us
To swing it with us in your old swill bucket
Down to Ali’s bar?
I fitted it upright, firm,
Squinting in through the barred window,
Thinking it might scare the living
Daylights out of the dead heavy drinkers,
Thinking it would schmock the sock…. No not so much
Schmock the sock, Piggles,
More
Shock the smock
Off some saint
Or other.
Some hope! There’s Tony’s pink plastic pig! They laughed.
We had not tricked them so I treated them.
You were ignored
You were the pigling who could not play dominoes,
Whose company no one wanted
You gnawed my toes under the table
And sulked all the way home.
Guess what though, Piggles!
That plastic pig is still up there
Ignored but squinting through the window
No one has even nibbled at it
Yet, but you are dead,
Ignored and gnawed.

OUIJA

Some of the saints came by,
Bless them!,
and brought the board.
Adulf was there. Sieg heil! He did not smile.
You know, mein Freund, the etymologish
origin of this Wee yah?
Hau ab, Adulf!
Columba, Brendan and some Holy Teagues came by.
Stout fellows!
Arrah! Begorra! Holy Mother and all the saints!
And isn’t it terrible bad luck, you know it is now,
To see an empty glass
This time of the evening?
And upside down too, bejasus!
Here too, Monica, our token woman,
Despairingly depressed, pathetically and pathologically
Dull as a beetle,
Generally out of sorts, spoke staccato to the click of the needles.
It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going!
She said. We launched the glass. Away we went
And summoned a spirit as easy as catching
A three legged camel’s
Stool,
But the Devil,
Who envies holy Guinness drinkers,
Sent us a baddie. A mean spirited spirit.
The glass began to prowl
Under the fingers of liplicking saints
BACON SANDWICH.
I looked for you but you had made yourself
Scarcer than nooky in a sandstorm.
The glass prowled on, vindictive in its emptiness,
Fractious in its upsidedownness.
PORK-PIE AND HP SAUCE.
You kept your snout down, did not show up!
For the lads
I found a plate of locusts,
Of both kinds.

PORKER

A good Sowe was ther of bisyde Bathe,
But she had lost her tayl and that was scathe.
Lusty she was, with hipes large of caste
And nipples ech more lufsom than the laste.’
That sort of thing. I spouted and your snout
Hardly flickered.
It’s Geoffrey Porker, Piggles,
Seminal pig-poet.
You munched your turnip and you did not care
For literature.
It rhymes. I said.
I waved my arms and gave
My sostenuto rendering of Porker
The all, but you were not impressed.
You might have been
Ted, the late lugubrious donkey
Who turned the screw,
For all the fun you were.

Peeved,
Was that my first moment
Of flagitious thought,
I loved you, Piggles,
Enough to eat you?

NUMBER 22

I dreamed I took you home to Thebes to meet my Mum.
Another mecca for our pigrims, Piggles,
Pigrims (sic) that is.
I see them stepping from the 80 bus,
Some sick some not so sick,
And queueing up at number 22,
Their scallop shells of quiet in their hands.
I dreamed my home but strangers live there now.
I dreamed my Mum but she’s long dead and gone.
Come in, she said, and wipe your muddy feet.
It’s nice to see you Tony. My! and you
Saint Tony these days, bless and save us!!
Our Toe a saint! My! Fancy that!
Just like that Paul McCartney. He’s done well!
No Mum, I said, He is a sir, I said.
He is a sir and not a saint. It’s not the same.
But is it better, Tony? asked my Mum.
Not better, only different. I said.
I whipped your poke off so my Mum could see.
Who’s this then?
This is Piggles. She’s a pig
From Nubia, Mum. Mum stroked your pretty head.
Good name for a pig, Tony.
You blinked and saw the greasy, tacky, smelly,
hutch of a kitchen. It confirmed
Your idea of Theban Life.
I’m glad that you’ve found someone after all
These years. I told your Dad you would.
Said my dead Mum.

FEVER

You had ignored me.
After all that I had told you about gnawing
Slugs and scorpions and planarian worms
Off the cave floor.
And now you had fever. You had a real ailment.
You had eaten a baddie.
You lay helpless and a little bit lazy
With the fever. You squeaked for Nubia,
But no-one came.
I bustled about and fetched some Benghazi bananas
Was this to be your Nubian dessert?
And lowered them,
One by one, into your piggy maw.
I wiped your tear-ruined snout
And wondered if
You might be,
Might just be,
Taking me for a ride.
Your piggy-eyes were inscrutable.
You did not let me know.
You said nothing,
Which was what I expected
Of you.

Meanwhile,
The good saint fetched loads of bananas.
The fat pigling lay on its back and scoffed the lot.

GNAWING

Gnawing calmed you.
Your snippy snappy snout
Was like a garden shredder. Objects
suffered, not least my rope soled sandals.
You ignored nothing
And gnawed the lot:
Slugs, bugs, planarian worms,
Whatever the cave offered.
I sat near you, barefoot,
Eating my quotidian supper,
Drinking your concentrated calm
And a quart or two of Guinness,
Fearing for my toes,
Watching your pretty pink sinuosities
Quiver with delight
While you gnashed turnips from Tripoli
And bananas from Benidorm,
No, not Benidorm exactly,
…Ben something?
Benghazi?
Right!
Benghazi.

MOONWALK

I walked beside you
Beneath the fat round
Of moon. What is moon?
I tried to tell you it was
Not your Mummy
That it would not sit on your head.
You were the Piggy-wig from the Land where the Bong-tree grows,
Unwilling to sell your ring
And your squeaks
Were like bits of beetles and spiders
Spat out by cats or owls
No, probably not cats
Come to think of it.
And when the moon-shadow of a mangy
Desert-dog scared you silly.
How could I share with you
The butcher’s block you saw,
The saw you foresaw.
My! How you squeaked under the unpolarised light!
Some fine moonlit night, I thought, you might turn poet,
My little fat pigling with your François Boucher bum.
My pretty odalisque Piggles, a pig poet
Who squeaks to the goddess.
How wrong I was!
But then, tell me!
Who needs pig poems?

YOU HATED SPADES

Spades frightened you. Spades,
By which, of course, Piggles,
I dont mean Nubians,
But spades with blades,
Spades with which to dig
Crap holes in the sand.
I can take them. But not you!
George, a saint, bless her!, came by to say Hi!
Stout legs in ammunition shorts,
Butch, but no butcher of piglings,
Dragons maybe,
Swinging her khaki spade.
No saint I know like Captain George
For calling a spade an entrenching-tool!
She was on her way to the desert,
For a Cappadocian crap.
Boy! Did you panic! You vomited with fear,
Hope you don’t mind
My mentioning your vomit.
Your Mummy had not taught you
To keep your muesli behind your Nubian snout.
You were not yet ready for spades.
You were only just learning
What a bloody-awful, wretched, woebegone, comfortless,
Forlorn, godforsaken, miserable
And, in your case,
Quite literally sickening
World this is.

YOUR TRIPOLI

Oea! Oea! you squeaked, so I took you with me,
Walked you on a lead through the soukh.
You dogged after me –
Pigged I should say –hoovering on the trot.
Your Tripoli was turnips and cabbages,
Nuts of the best, carrots and cucumbers,
Pumpkins and pears. Your little snout
Went in and out. Your gushy grunts I decoded
Into a gimme, gimme, that came as no surprise.
My Tripoli I kept from you
While yet another Focke whistled by.
Blessed Erwin, had he been there,
Or our friend Saint Adulf,
Might have whistled some funking Wagner
Beneath the lamp-posts.
They might have taught the jolly jerboas to sing
Lili Marlene and given the game away.
I shot sly glances at the bullet-holes
Not to disturb the pretty pigling in you
That was sniffing blindly and trusting to provender.
Oea! Oea!, you squeaked,
While in my Tripoli
We were never more than an energetic spit
From a scrap-happy desert-rat.

A PINK WOOL KNITTED DRESS

You lay on the floor
In your pink wool knitted dress.
Botulf came by to say 'bye to us,
Blushing and off to blighty in the morning,
Brimming with God’s grace and gobsmacked by you.
Gosh! Piggles, I say!
You look really nice!
He said,
He says I say!
He says I say! all the time, I don’t say anything!
(What’s that Madam? You had to read that twice.
Inverted commas might have made it clearer.
Give up, my love, and go back to Pam Ayres!)
What a topping dress!
The colour suits you jolly well.
(This to a pink pigling!)
Saint Monica knitted it. I told him.
I asked her to bring the needles
But was misunderstood.
Knit-one, pearl-one all blessed weekend!
Enough to try the patience!
You were pretty as a picture though,
Transfigured, the holy, wholly holey dress
Made you seem quite naked,
Your little eyes like pyropes in the snow,
Much more naked than when you were quite naked,
Somehow!
Not that I’d turk it, you understand, Botulf. I said.
No, I would jolly well think not, old man.
Said Botulf. Wouldn’t even think of it.
I said. Well, quite!, not cricket!
old man, not very saintly, what?
Bye now Piggles and Tony,
He said. I’ll leave you two alone.

THE HOWL

I saw my world again through your piggy eyes.
Serpents and scorpions, huge, snout-high,
Twisting their live, lithe bodies
Into marks of interrogation
Or, as some would have it, question-marks,
A saint may choose.
Camels to you were four knock-kneed legs
Towering from the desert sands
And even mangy dogs and jackals, creatures to look up to.
The answers to your questions were often unsatisfactory:
A bite, a sting, a kick up the rubber bum, a dog-nip,
I felt for you but you did not squeak
All that much.
Your frustrations made me mindful,
I remembered that moonlit night on the Zagazig road
When I, taken for a lamp-post,
Was startled by the three-legged disapproval
Of a wild-dog. I was wild too.
I kicked him.
We were both wild.
How we howled!

FATE PLAYING

How many times had I told you?
Pigs are no-hopers in the desert.
Camels maybe.
Even if I had hung a compass round your pink neck
You would never have allowed for magnetic variation.
As for maps, a sheet of strong, brown, wrapping paper
Is about it round here.
Telamons, caves and saints strictly not marked,
Just a few jebels maa arif and wadis.

You wanted to be the camel
That we do not possess.
Pig-headed and pathetic, you had to see for yourself.
When I found you,
Molten by the sun,
You were more pork than pig.
I was lucky to find you not yet crackling,
Or was it fate
Playing as in the title?
You were like a lost and found golf-ball,
Outwardly baked,
Rubbery inside, tense and squashed.
God! how you squealed!
You were a packet of emotions,
A muesli mix.
Gratitude that I had found you made you cling to me
With your pink, sand-in-the-toes trotters.
Your despair clinging to my face like custard pie.
No longer a wannabee camel, just a pathetic female squeaker,
Your love was magnified many times,
At least.
I had fetched the poke.
I bore you cavewards while beneath my feet
The desert quaked.

FIDELITY

She was just one of the gang,
A good lay-
Woman but a saint, bless her!.
The Widow, we lads called her.
Did the rounds for a bit of holy communion.
Been coming for years
To the caves
Long before you trotted out of my poke.
This time it had been a while and a while.
I had forgotten her moniker.

Those were the days her boy was giving grief,
Little Augustinus, Ach du liebe!
He’ll break my heart yet, that son of many tears,
Up to no good down in wicked Carthage,
Into bondage by now
Ill be bound.

I wanted to introduce her to you.
Piggles this is….
…It’s Monica!
Yes, of course, it was on the tip of my tongue.
Speaking of which, said the widow
Guess whats all the rage down the Casablanca?

She rushed straight to the rush-mat and the point,
Knelt at my feet.
Me, I wanted none of it. A holy law
Had invented itself. Somehow,
You had already become my first lady
And your piggy eyes
Were watching every twitch.
No, Monica, no!

The Widow needn’t have worried.
Little Augustine came up smelling of roses.
Six weeks later they’d made him
Not only saint, bless him!,
But bishop.

These days, when you are so dead
And no-one comes knocking,
(O Ali! I should have drained my glass
before it was taken from me.)
I think of the Widow as a time I never used
And could have done with.

GOD HELP THE SAINT FOR WHOM THE PIGLING DOES NOT SQUEAK

The Devil, who envies all that’s good,
Knowing I wouldn’t be expecting
A lap-dancing pigling,
Smuggled in hips and lipsticks
Bosoms &co.
And from somewhere unlikely,
A long blonde wig.
He had you trottering about
on four-inch heels.
You always wanted to please, Piggles.
Diobolically transmogrified
you were my salami Salome,
my marzipan Messalina,
Plump and pink.
Seven veils was it?I wasn’t counting.

You swayed like a pork belly-dancer,
I was not unimpressed. I was sore tempted.
You threw your trotters round my saintly knees:
I love you, I love you, I love you,
The Devil’s karaoke in my ear.
The illusion was complete and
I, damned-near damned,
Was fooled stiff.
All would have been lost if you had not sort of grunted.
Your high pitched grunt, squeak, squeal
no deep-throated houri ever made.
You put me on my guard.
The scales fell
You were yourself again and I was mine
I was a saint. You were the pig in the wig
Whose dancing nobody wanted.
The Devil departed roaring
The way he does.

Whats left of you, Piggles, and your unwanted dance
now you are so dead?
A dusty veil, your pretty G-string,
These blonde locks.

THE MACHINE

Where was I now? Ah yes, I must insist
Wherever I was, I wasn’t turking you.
What saint would?
Although you were so pink and curvy cute.
But you and I rushed onto my rush mat
With bounce enough for
The four-and-twenty pet budgies
Which we did not possess.
As for the screw? You hated the machine
But I was proud of it
And folk would come for miles
To see our telamons
And to watch Edward, our sad donkey,
power old Archimedes.
You hated it a lot
Since that fell day
When, soaking wet and dizzy,
You spiralled up into
The irrigation channels.
Fish would have swum,
Budgies would have flown away
But pigs can neither swim nor fly.
They say the latter is a good job too,
And they are right.
I think you saw your Mum in that machine
Straight as a sow’s tail with teeth that nip
And with a bent for sitting on your head.
And where was I the while?
Knocking back the Guinness here
With Columba,
A saint, God bless him!,
And other holy Teagues at Ali’s bar,
Harping on to the Irish, stout chaps,
About your rubber bum
And hope-you-dont-mind ear.
(O Ali, take away this foaming brew,
Its far too black! Have you no paler ale?)
While you were being screwed.

THE HERMITAGE, SINAI

Hell, well, what is this all about?
I mean life, Piggles.
There's something fetching in a home address
Which saint or poet
Or pigling has immortalized,
Conscious that queues of silly pigrims (sic)
Might one day just make the effort.
So here, in Sinai, at the Hermitage,
I lay your curly trail
And mine.
Would that be arrogance, presumption or simply bounce?
Here you ran snuffling like you were truffling.
I knew that you were searching madly for
Your lost long Mummy and not finding her.
Not surprising I thought, for she long had been
Transumed to sausages and chops and ham
Black-puddings, streaky-bacon and the rest,
And not surprising for she long had been
Eaten mostly.
I loved you maugre your ugly Nubian snout,
Your piggy eyes that proved you were no film-star,
Your torn ear, hope you don’t mind
Me mentioning that ear again,
Your hairy nostrils and your rubber bum.
I kissed you and I held you in my arms.
I took you to my bed, but, let’s be clear,
No saint I know would ever turk a pig.
Nor did I neither.

TROPHY

I knew from the first
That you had trouble with words.
It was what I expected from a pigling.
When you saw the lion you squeaked
Or squealed. It was enough.
I understood.
You had no wish to be diminished.
You skipped across the desert and it was
Once more a streak of sunset on the Nile.
What saved you this time? Maybe a stray sheep,
Lions preferring mutton to pork chops
Any day of the week, or so I’m told.

Later I picked up the horny skull
Of some old sheep,
Killed by your lion or wasted by disease?
Was this a trophy, Piggles,
Or an atrophy?

THE NIP

You were lucky not to have snuffed it
Earlier.
The way your Mum kept sitting on your head.
Was there no creep to keep you
Safe from those clumsy, mumsy hindquarters?
But she’s dead now. Her hams are dead and eaten.
Mostly.
I might observe, Piggles,
Death seems to run in your family,
Gallop even.
Then there’s that torn ear,
You don’t, I hope, mind me going on about it,
Now that both you and Mummy are so dead.
A mother should not nip her little-ones.
A mother is for nipples not for nips
And those peevish pigs’ teeth
Might have settled your hash,
cooked your goose, made mincemeat of you.
As Adulf said, das ist ein Sauerei!
Jawohl, Adulf, mein Freund!

SAINT BOTULF

Adulf, a saint, bless him! came along.
Sieg heil, Adulf! He did not smile.
Darf ich vorstellen brother Botulf,
My brother, brother,
And by my brother, I really mean
My brother, not just any old brother, brother.
Some name him brother Botolph, others brother Botulf
A saint may choose, mein Freund, out from UK.
More English than the English, these days.
Done the Nile, done the pyramids,
He wanted not to miss
Tony and his telamons

Ach, wo! but who’s this little swine?
I introduced you to them.
O what a tight, rubbery ball of joy!
You wobbled on perfect, pink,
Allthewayuptoyourbelly, trotters.
Plumper
Than ever you were before,
Your piggy eyes bright as a squashed glow worm,
Bright as a Pembroke scholar,
And the torn pig’s ear where your mother nipped you
Smiled in welcome.

I say! Really! Gosh! What a jolly nice pig!
Botulf swayed on his English legs and swooned.
You were just too pink and precious,
Just too elegant and Nubian,
Meeting you was
Just too much.