2 Poems : Not Mine

[dunners]

READ THESE OUTLOUD, AND ENJOY AS I HAVE.

LPs

If music hadn't stunned them
they'd be less upright
and orderly, confounded
by the echolalia of usurpers;
and slipping free of the rack,
welcome a spin away
from Coventry. To twist,
jive, rock n' roll, to samba,
mambo and waltz, to jig
jitterbug and jump, limbo
and swim, shake and shimmy;
take a break in a decade
of their own making
amid quiffs and stray hair
not in this unremarkable
glare of their absence,
a coup d' etat of the air.
Twelve inches of stalled
reckoning while their minder
got stoned on a riff -

Ah stiff! Party-goers,
they always skipped a beat
or swerved from the track,
and space they claimed
as a right, when memory thins,
is better claimed back.

Exile's
and eclipsed disc parade
when a die-hard fad's sacked.

Sahib

Gastronomically, I beg:
keep away from my table
the seditious ratatouille
(it blows-out my braces);
curry not, in this dotage,
to my years as Sahib;
stall like a new-issue uniform
the sushi or sauerkraut,
all the dished that follow
a forgein s to my bib.
Let me fart with abandon;
let me be an old goon
for unabridged versions
of Mrs Beeton and the force
in thrifty stewed prunes.

---Andrew Sant