REMISSION

Sometimes, kiddo,

Things get just a little too serious,

Don’t you find?

Life and Death and all that,

Well, I know they’re both important

And not always fun.

Times like that I’m glad I’ve got you to talk to

Even posthumously and

Postprandially.

Believe me! It really does help.

Back at The Hermitage, the Devil came by with some more visions

I could have done without.

The tempting fiend, diobolically transmogrified

Into a monkey-fingered Indian cook,

Curried favour and you, Piggles,

Served, with poppodoms, you,

Sweet-flavoured enough to make a saint spit,

On a spit.

You had been plumping up nicely for a pet

But the Devil, who envies all that’s good,

Disposed me to see:
Four Cumberland sausages for your four fat legs,

A pink pork belly that besought beans,

A ham-acting rubber bum.

It was enough to try the patience.

What saved you this time?

Saint George, bless her!, came by with fish and chips.

Nice piece of cod, Tony!

Passeth understanding, Captain George!

We laughed.

You escaped incommunicado

beneath the table.

You were remitted.

ALI'S BAR

That sand-blasted Sunday morning at Ali’s glummy bar,
In from the desert to find the place deserted.

Just you and me, Piggles!

Home from our holy days

And not a blessed Teague

In sight.

Mass evacuation, Ali!, What?

He did not smile.

No saints came marching in.

Not even a Desert Father to call

Daddy-o.

I was mooding into my Guinness,

Searching for the secret ingredient,

Missing the bimbi

And fantasising about black Fatima’s thighs.

You were pretty glummy too,

Pathetic even.

But what a pickup when church let out

And the dominoes team,

Saint Columba and the holy Teagues, stout fellows,

All saints, bless them,

Fell in like little bits of heaven

From out the sky

One day.

A thumping of dominoes

Followed a gulping of  diurnal Guinnesses

And an elutriation of sand-blown, parrot’s-cage,

Scrawny throats,

And when old Colly told the one about the one-legged nun

And the Taoiseach.

How we all laughed despite the agony.

Tears streamed over our pious cheeks,

Trickled along the ridges of our holy noses,

Dripped down our blessed beards

And splashed into our good-for-gulping Guinnesses

And onto our sand-strewn dominoes.

For one moment

I fondly thought, dear Piggles,

You too were able to shut your little piggy

Eyes to the bloody-awful, wretched, woebegone, comfortless,

Forlorn, godforsaken, miserable

Nature of this weary world.

But no,  you were just shutting your piggy eyes.

   

PORTRAITS

 

 Who was the joker who painted that portrait of you?

Augustine/John?

One or the other, saints both, bless them!

Whoever, he got carried away,
Fell over his easel

Easily done I said
He did not smile.

Then he fed his colours,
Pinks exclusively,
Into your
Piggy image.

You to the life, Piggles,

Pink and pathetic,

Delicately blushing

But no-one would notice.

Suddenly -  ‘What was that falling?’

A shadow of Yaddo?

No, it was the sun.

It was the onset of the sunset.

Augustine/John smiled as

The pink light rubbed you out..

'If it’s there I paint it,

If it’s not I don’t.’

He said.

In the end

You were the pigling nobody needed to paint.

You were the ‘Pig at Sunset’s Onset.’

Subsumed by a pink window,

I was disappointed.

I really wanted that painting.

You, however, were short on opinion.

You did not comment

Which was expected.

STARCHED SHIRT

Suddenly I needed a holy day from you.

I just wanted to be clever alone,

Wanted to cut a figure

Sharp-edged and pigless, white in the moonlight.

Which of the holy bimbi, bless them,

Had starched my best shirt?

Sister Suzy Wong surely?

You trotted behind.

Go away Piggles!

You hung about.

Push off!  Go play with the girls!

You would not hear.

Shove off!  Go snuffle a truffle!

Suddenly you were enough to try the patience.

Piss off, Piggles!

You did not piss off.

You crept beneath my feet.

Pop-eyed and pathetic,

Peeping up at my essential pinkness

Hoping to find your dead and eaten Mum here,

Behind and beneath the sharp edges of my starched shirt.