Category: Parody

When Brian Became Broccoli, by Ben Macnair


By Robert Garnham

When Brian Became Broccoli

When asked what he wanted to be,
three-year-old Brian thought about it,
for a while, and with a smile,
said that he would like to be Broccoli.

A strange choice for a career,
you might have thought,
but Brian was only three,
the age where you could be what you wanted to be.

When a kindly local Wizard was told of this tale,
he visited Brian and asked: ‘And who might you be?’
Are you the little boy who wanted to become Broccoli?
Brian nodded his head.

Brian went to bed that night,
but he woke up with a bit of a fright.
His hair was green, stiff, and standing on end.
The following night, he went to bed,
and woke up completely Green.
His Mum and Dad had never seen anything
quite so obscene.

The next day, they found Brian in bed.
He had become Broccoli.
The kindly Wizard broke the spell,
and for 14 years, all was well.

Until the Wizard turned up one day,
and was quite drunk.
‘I am afraid that the spell didn’t quite wear off.’
he said because Brian was becoming a Punk.

Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire, in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair

 

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull, by Janet Sillett


By Robert Garnham

Why I ended up (for a while) in Hull

My group of friends read Larkin aloud
skiving off hockey,
outliers in a school
which dished out piety at 9am

We admired his contrariness,
dirty words,
and suburban weariness,
his constipated ennui

Larkin inspired me to study
in a god forsaken east coast city
a shared terrace with a parrot
a bath in the kitchen
on Anlaby Road

I skulked in vain in the library,
until we parted company abruptly,
Hull, Larkin and me
I moved on, as they say,
to Plath, Stevens, Crane
to a concrete place of learning,
and Larkin expressed his adoration
for Margaret Thatcher

I reread his poems, when living
in bedsits, in semis,
in the disillusionment of marriage

But let’s face it,
Larkin was a bigot, racist, serial snob
I want to see them starving,
the so-called working class
nostalgic for the good old days
when only white men played cricket for England

Consumer of pornography
(but never in the library)
composer of sado­masochistic reveries
shared to fellow man poets
posh adolescents fumbling with themselves
in bedrooms after lights out

I want to cancel Larkin
unknow his life,
his pervasion of archetypal Englishness
I settle for drowning in his poetry
with fingers in my ears

PS Apologies to Hull which I now think is a great place.

Janet Sillett recently took up writing poetry and short fiction again after decades of absence. She has had poems published in the Galway Advertiser, Poetry Plus magazine and Spilling Cocoa over Martin Amis, and flash fiction in Litro. She works for a think tank.

 

Grumbles, by Amanda Baker


By Robert Garnham

Grumbles

I don’t want air treacle in my nostrils
a sullen clot of exhaustion in my stomach
sending spider webs of weakness through my veins
as I trudge up the hill.

I don’t want the miniature catgut squeal
of mosquitoes behind my right ear
to brush its crushed body off my upper arm
as I flail at the soft hollow behind my knee
driven in from my twilight garden.

I don’t want to stretch my fingers to relax
after clenching the steering wheel for thirteen hours
trapped between the swaying container walls
yellow blue and white barely visible in the torrential rain
as useless goods get transported across Europe
in response to an impulsive click on the tick box.

I want to be Legolas,
dancing lightly through ancient lichen-hung forests,
intact ecological webs singing their joy,
untouched by wildfires, beetles and drought.

Amanda Baker is based in Berlin. As a scientist, teacher, and animal physiotherapist, she loves exploring new ideas. She has had performances in KlinkerdIn, the Curious Fox and Over the Edge and has poems published in Automatic Pilot, Poethead and Strukturriss. She thoroughly enjoys Kevin Higgins’ Poetry workshops.

 

Because it’s total crap, by Karen Jones


By Robert Garnham

Because it’s total crap

Ratner lifted the lid on a sherry decanter
At £4.95 a pop too good to countenance
When asked about his high-street gems
Little tacky rings for working class girls
Risking bedtime dealings with blue collar boys

It was Gerald who had himself by the balls
All for earrings costing less than a quid
He’d choke on an M&S sandwich now
Fish the prawns himself if he could
Than grapple with the loss of a
$10 billion business, 10 seconds to nought

Now 30 years after the biggest PR gaffe
The Sultan of Bling can only think back
To Mrs Ratner and her word of advice
The only pearl he declined to string
Ego really is a terrible thing

Karen Jones is new to writing poetry, a student of Kevin Higgins, born in Northern Ireland, living in Dublin and working in public relations.

 

My Mother Doesn’t Know that I’m a Poet, by Rodney Wood


By Robert Garnham

MY MOTHER DOESN’T KNOW THAT I’M A POET
after Billy Bennett

I’m cherishing a secret about this poets-life I lead
as according to the papers that she reads all poets
are lazy bastards, cads and cowards who live in ivory towers.
They’re scum of the earth, much worse than bureaucrats
and really don’t give a toss for anyone but numereo uno
but I know is that really us poets are decent folk.
All the people I hang out with think I’m quite OK
and say I’m a poet of the much more pleasant sort
but I never breathe a word of this at home.

You see my mother doesn’t know that I’m a poet
sometimes she sees the inky stains upon my clothes,
the trembling of my voice and that haunted look in my eyes
I tell her is from the solvent I’ve been using for cocaine.
When I spend hours in my room alone and writing poems
I tell her not to worry as I’m only watching porn.
and when I go to London for a Forward or TS Eliot Prize
I tell mother I’m off to meet and reminisce with fascists
because you see, I’ll never tell my mother I’m a poet.

And those parcels that drop through my letter box
I say are guns, knives, explosives, lubricants and sex
toys. If she knew I was a poet she’d shoot me like a dog
and all those books came, I say, by mistake from catalogues
and I keep them, just in case. She can think I’m a murderer
before she’ll know the truth. I have to respect her old age but
she knows that I’m a liar, a crook and arsonist
but it would break her poor old heart if she found out
that I write odes, epics, ballads and get my kicks from sonnets
so thank heavens Mother doesn’t know that I’m a poet.

 

Or your scants will come back to haunt you, by Beth McDonough


By Robert Garnham

Or your scants will come back to haunt you

Here’s to the thrill of ethical knickers

delivered by post through your own front door.
Each pair of pants comes carefully wrapped
in tactile fantastic brown papery packets,
patterned with turtles, octopuses and whales,
skilfully block-printed in India.

All of these garments are guaranteed free
of nasties like plastics, except just perhaps
those barcoded stickers proclaiming these knickers
one hundred per cent organic cotton, designed
entirely to delight on the very fine Isle of Wight,
dyed in colours as smashing as eggshell.

Already, I’m advised on my pants’ end of life,
little symbols explain how these ethical undies
can be sent back, then recycled safely. I must
express just a little alarm about future
manufacturing tactics of endless elastic, but
why not have big hopes for the morals of smalls?

Beth McDonough’s poetry is widely anthologised and published in Magma, Gutter, and elsewhere. Her first solo pamphlet Lamping for pickled fish is published by 4Word.Fairly soon, her site-specific poem will be installed on the Corbenic Poetry Path. She swims year round in the Tay, foraging close by.

 

On Flatulence, by Simon Williams


By Robert Garnham

On Flatulence

It’s commonly held that farts are methane.
While this is true for cows, sheep, goats
and other herbivores, it’s not for humans.
Our flatus (that’s the word, I looked it up)
is largely hydrogen, lighter than air.

So the story of the Persian Prince
with noteworthy and continuous flatulence,
who is supposed to have suffocated himself
while asleep on a low bed-pallet on a trip abroad,
could not have happened.

However, should an equerry have brought a lamp,
a naked flame into the chamber,
his highness, without rising from his sleep,
could have raised the roof.
I think that trumps the suffocation story.

 

One of my Finest, by Clive Oseman


By Robert Garnham

ONE OF MY FINEST

I’ve written a poem that I think is good.
Probably the third best I have written
if I’m honest,
and the fourth best is awesome!
It was published in a journal
edited by my mate.
But I’m not one to blow my own trumpet.
I’ve tried. God knows I’ve tried,
but I’m not flexible enough.

I shouldn’t be reading it tonight really
because I’ve submitted it to Poetry North…. Swindon.
Yeah, Poetry North Swindon.
But I don’t think they’ll be listening.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t perfect.
The rhyme scheme is as obvious as a
Tory at an empathy farm,
and it doesn’t always flow perfectly
which is a shame I suppose, probably.

And there are bits where
I lost concentration because
the ferret was up my trouser leg.
I keep telling it, not when I’m writing,
but it never listens.

The strength of the poem is its depth.
It’s deeper than the Atlantic Ocean
if all the whales took a piss at the same time
on a particularly rainy day,
So you’ll have to listen at least twice
before you get it.

The poem deals with
the issues of the day
in a very novel way,
like why Margaret Thatcher is
the human equivalent of Smallpox
and why Man at C&A is the
only way to shop for clothes.

Ok, it seems a bit behind the times
but you know history has a way
of repeating itself like a
particularly vengeful gherkin
on a wet Sunday evening,
so really it’s ahead of its time
in a Swindon kind of way.

What? Why a wet Sunday?
When else would you eat gherkins, stupid?
Jeez some people ask
the most ridiculous questions.

Anyway, the poem is so good
I’ve decided not to read it tonight.
If you want to hear it send
£20 via bank transfer.

I’m sorry to inflict
this rubbish on you instead

Just class it as a metaphor
for disappointment.
Crushing, soul destroying
disappointment,
and a valuable lesson learned.

Clive Oseman is a a Brummie spoken word artist, comedian, satirist and promoter based in Swindon. His third poetry collection was published by Black Eyes Publishing UK in 2020.

 

Ketchup : An Obituary, by Kevin Higgins


By Robert Garnham

Ketchup: An Obituary

It all started that Friday he came home brandishing
another bottle of it, when there was already one
gleaming unopened in the fridge. A mistake,
the whole house told itself.

Next week he turned up dragging
six bags of almost nothing else.
From then on, had it with everything:
on his bread instead of butter; with
his cornflakes instead of his usual
low-fat milk.

Eventually, dispensing with all else,
as his main course,
tomato ketchup with a side of
another shining blob of itself.

After which, he hardly opened the front door,
except to sign for deliveries, the vast jars of it
that arrived twice weekly in a van
marked Ketchup.

When he wasn’t golloping it by the basin load,
he used it instead of shaving foam,
toothpaste, and as an ointment
to balm embarrassing rashes.
Spent most of the day bathing in it.

By the time he made it safely to his coffin
he was the colour of it,
looked as if all you need do was squeeze him
and the perfect dip for a plate of hand-cut fries
would spurt gloriously from between
those tomato coloured lips.

Kevin Higgins was born in London. He mostly grew up in and lives in Galway City. In 2016 The Stinging Fly magazine described Kevin as “likely the most read living poet in Ireland. His poems have been quoted in The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Times (London), Hot Press, The Daily Mirror and on The Vincent Browne Show, and read aloud by film director Ken Loach at a political meeting in London. His sixth full collection of poems ‘Ecstatic’ will be published by Salmon in March 2022.