THE FISHING BRIDGE

You and me and some other felucca,
Floating, grammatically precariously, down the Nile,
Me taking holy day snaps,
You, a pink rosebud, curled and naked,
Peeping with piggy eyes at the sun’s dazzle.
Were you for once maybe nearly happy,
Almost not too desperately pathetic,
Perhaps even smug?
I was snap happy,
Catching the sisters, Mimi, Fifi, Fatima and little Lolita
Suzie Wong and Laura with the aura,
Hopping about the deck
In their pretty black and white bikinis,
All saints bless them!,
When some crafty thieving Theban fishing from a bridge,
Managed to hook your other pink pig’s ear,
The ear your mother had not nipped.
Suddenly you were an angler’s dangler.
You were the squealing fish that no one expected to catch.
Was there nun to help you?
Only bouncing bikini clad Saint Mimi, bless her,
Captain of the netball team,
Leaping for your rubber bum, saving your bacon.
From its ascension into oven.
How we saints all laughed!
But you were pained.
You were terribly, terribly hurt.
You were no longer nearly so nearly happy.

Believe me Piggles,
When, in the course of time,
I found myself looking down on your very
Dead
Carcase,
Many
Tears fell upon those ugly
Tears
In your dead, deaf pig’s
Ears.

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.