So I was thinking, if I happened to be looking for a job, what kind of job would I be looking for? Okay, so I have a job, but what if I didn’t have one? What if, all of a sudden, I were to be told that mere months from now I’d be out on my ear in the big big city with nothing but my enormous brain to recommend me? Obviously there’s no money in poetry, and besides, I’m very bad at it. So I sat down to write a letter to a prospective employer:

Dear Russell Brand

Oh Russell, oh Russell, let me comb your dark locks
Let me iron your y-fronts and treat your sex-pox
I shall sew on your jeans so they cut off your blood
And I’ll make you well known ‘mongst the brave and the good

Oh Russell, oh Russell, no more shall you pout
I’ll do it all for you, so you’ve time to doubt
Yes, sit there all lonely, oh Russell my dear
And maybe with time all will seem very clear

One night, when your head is reposing in sleep
I’ll abandon my knitting and slowly shall creep
I’ll cut off your hair, and your ears, and your nose
Your manhood and fingers and all of your toes

And, while you lie croaking, all bleeding and raw
All of a sudden you’ll see what we saw
Just before death comes, you’ll suddenly see
How without you, dear Russell, how good it will be

With your last dying words, your last lungful of breath
Perhaps you’ll repent, dear, repent and confess
To being annoying and squeaky and dull
And probably, secretly, even from Hull

Oh Russell, your funeral – no-one will come
Not even the vicar, not even your Mum
But your absence will merely develop your charm
And I doubt that society’ll sustain lasting harm.

Yours in expectation,

Minnie xxx

…Do you think I’ll get the job? I’m crossing my fingers.

Those pohts at the Tate Modern, they’re so different to me. Either my pohtry takes the piss or it is simply dreadful. Unfortunately, the latest pohm falls into the latter category. I wince to share it – because although I pretend I’m all secret and hidden, hell, everyone knows who I am.

This pohm is for my Dad. No, mother, I shall not save it for his birthday. He’ll get a new one for his damn birthday. Anyway, the background: we had to write a pohm based on the concept of clothing made out of something not clothing clothes. Metaphorical and stuff. With not just sight but sound and smell.

Interesting. Inspiring. Most were tempted by the hand of greatness. I was tempted by the hand of crapness.

---

A masterpiece in grey

My father winces as he sits at his desk, rubbing his temples.
His secretary would have you believe that it is probate, troubling him again,
And, in a way, it is.
For he has shrugged off his coat of music
In favour of his suit of death.

In precisely two hours and fourteen minutes, he will shed his silent shroud of sympathy
And take up the worn and leathery cloak of wrinkled sound.
We smell it now, together: that familiar smell of beer and smoke and public house
And hear the violins and beating drums and raucous tunes
All implicit in the coat of noise and hubbub
So far removed
So far detached
– In fact –
Two hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty seconds away.

---

CUE SILENCE

“…Hmmm, yes, promising. Now you can take that away and work on it.”

As I said, hand of crapness.

Anyway, in response to the unspoken (and probably well-administered) damning criticism of my pohm, and thus my inbuilt traditional values, and thus of my father who installed them into me, here is a second pohm.

---

Crumbs

I feel the crumbs beneath my toes
In my coat of many biscuits
Jammy Dodgers unleash their thick and fruitful juices
Onto the wafer thins beneath.

Oh, admire me in my coat of biscuits
Running through the biscuit tin of life
Merging and mingling with the Boasters
And shying away from the inferior Hobnobs
Oh
Oh chocolate crusts become me
Oh
Oh bourbon creams’ve undone me

Oh crunchiness, that stuff of life
I love your sweet and… (That’s enough. You’re fired. -ED)

---

BTW: how did I get lessons at the Tate? I handed over £120 online. Simple as that. As in, “I must be really simple to hand over £120 in a well-meaning but completely ineffectual attempt to improve my crappy pohtry.” They try very hard to improve me. But I just can’t be improved. There is, frankly, nothing to improve upon. Bless their little hearts.

So, I have poetry class tomorrow, and like the errant schoolgirl I am, I’m doing my homework at the very last minute.

We have to write a poem about a piece of surrealist art at the Tate Modern… except the only thing that sticks in my mind is that lobster, the one balanced on top of a phone. I’d put a picture up, except, well – it’s a lobster. On a telephone. Which is impossible to write a poem about – I mean, in a serious, surrealist manner. What does the lobster make me think? What does it make me feel? It makes me feel disgusted that they pay actual money for lobsters perched precariously atop bloody telephones, that’s what it makes me feel.

So, in the spirit of cleansing the phone-happy lobster from my already bogged-up temporal lobe, I shall give it what it needs: I shall write something about it, and then move on.

Dave the lobster boy
It was a cold winter evening, a pivotal evening, the kind of evening that can make or break lives. The flat was littered with beer cans, empty shells full of nothing but lost promise; the air was thick with the heavy-set lingering fog of marijuana – a fog which threatened to ensconce and entomb them all. The occupants sat, slumped against the walls and sofas, eyelids heavy with an unnatural waking sleep. In one corner, a gaudy televisual nightmare glared out towards their transient non-receptive brains… Teletubbies were indeed the shit, and well they knew it.

Slowly, a head stirred, and a slurred and dull voice rang out through the dirty, weighty mists. “Dave, man, I’m half-starved. Ring for pizza, dude.”

Dave opened his eyes. Pizza. Good idea. Perhaps chips, too… chips seemed good. He had the munchies, by god he had the munchies. He motivated himself into action… and then stopped, stopped entirely still. His brain tried to compute, but failed. Something was wrong.

Geoffry looked over at Dave. He’d been standing by the phone for the last two minutes, simply staring, in deep contemplation. He nearly didn’t like to say anything – but now was the time, here was the place, and pizza was the required foodstuff. “Dave, what the hell’s up? Ring for pizza, dude, ring for pizza.”

“I can’t,” said, said Dave, in a small and strangulated voice. “The lobster says I mustn’t.”

-=Two years on=-

Dave smiled over his coffee cup. The coffee in the canteen was good, better than it should be. The lobster was wrong about that.

The lobster wasn’t wrong about many things, though. The lobster had guided him well through life. Given, his friends had deserted him – granted, his family had given up as well. But he had the lobster. The lobster was all he needed. The lobster helped him talk to god. He knew that, without his telephonic lobster, he was nothing. For the lobster had told him so.

“Up we get, David my love, it’s time for your medication.” Dave looked up at Deirdre, as she leant low to speak to him, her cleavage in his face. She was quite sexy for a 50-year-old overweight psychiatric nurse. She had these slightly large, claw-like hands, and beautifully deep, shiny, reddened cheeks.

But that wasn’t the best part. David shuddered with the beauty of it. She had glorious deep red hair. He knew it was unnatural, but then how natural was it to be friends with lobsters?

She would be his. The lobster had told him. And the lobster was nearly always right.

…Check this out. I like how me and Imaginary Scenes have this little mutual site-pimping thing going on now, by the way. I have reason to believe they like Elbow, though, so it’s all as it should be. I also like the Village Idiot’s cool response-pohm on the last post before. Nice. Tempted to steal it for my next class, but I shall keep my thieving little pinkies tight in their pockets.

More pohms soon, honest to god. Then maybe I can get my hits up. Pohtry class on Monday, anyway… Muah ha ha ha ha ha.

I went to a poetry class today. I mean, I figured it couldn’t actually make my poetry worse. However, I don’t think that poetic surrealism necessarily suits my particular style. We were given a list of first lines, and told to construct a poem from them. Bugger knows where my first line came from, but here it is: “The table-silver survives in big shoals deep down where the Atlantic is black”. Tee hee, I thought.

The table-silver survives in big shoals deep down where the Atlantic is black
The butter dish undulates, capturing salt spoons in its tendrils
Candlesticks creep up on unsuspecting teacups
And dinner plates scuttle across the sea bed, silently.

As we swim here, treading water, watching passing gravy boats,
We all know that tonight we’ll sleep in the ocean
And will wake tomorrow with silt in our mouths.

..This didn’t go down particularly well with the surrealist poem bods. Big silence. “Hmmm. I like the silty mouths bit. Next?”

“Why George,” said Tony, “it’s a beautiful day.
I’ve got out my toys, but what game shall we play?”
“Why Tony,” said George, “we’ll play soldiers of course,
And maybe Sneaky Saddam will come join us today.”

“He knocked over my sandcastle whilst at the beach,
And even though Mummy may threat to impeach
It’s a jolly fine game, and we’ll get Saddam back,
And set our agenda re: the whole Middle East.”

So they set off to war with their guns and packed lunch
(They’d packed sarnies and crispies and soldiers to munch)
They had every intent to effect regime change
And, while they were at it, Saddam’s goolies to crunch

So BANG! went their missiles, and BANG! went their guns
Even more fun was had than that time with the Huns
Saddam? Off with his head, and now he is dead
And “Brilliant,” said George, “Mummy’s packed us iced buns!”

When footage came out, Mummy wanted an answer.
“We can’t give you one,” said Tone and the Chancellor.
“Oh well,” Mummy said, “I’ll forget by next week”
And all Brits concerned lived content ever after.