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.