‘ARACH ‘N’ ID’

‘Arach ‘n’ Id’—reads the signpost outside the Freudian pub,
Spiderman’s favourite.
The pub’s website is a sight,
The source of fright, discussed at night.
They serve hot food all day to anorexics.

Vans from Iceland make home deliveries
To the pub—igloos!
Surreal darts tournaments turn a mint:
A player holds a dart while others throw the board at them.

Value subtracted tax is levied by the ‘public Ann,’
Androgynous analytical being,
She believes the ghost of Sartre makes love to her every night.
Irregular customers think she’s right,
Trying with all their might
To catch the insouciant herbalist,
Whose nightly cries of:
‘Thyme at the bar now, please,’ fail to appease.

When the police are called to the pub to cause trouble,
Builders in the bar—wet cement on their faces, create designer rubble.
Eccentrics’ extant tricks pricks the conscience of the psychopathic doorman,
Selling lumps of plasticine to fools seeking illicit drugs.

A skull and crossed fire extinguishers tattooed on Ann’s forehead,
Emblematic of the pub,
Is photographed by Japanese tourists,
Poor wrists inadequately shoot video footage.
Pub folklore is imparted,
Officially, by the junior sub-bore with Alzheimer’s,
Fascinating the facile, and self-perpetuating myths,
Building the pub’s standing (which is) in the community.

Community chest cards from Monopoly games,
Donated by silhouette projectionists,
Are stacked on every available surface,
Revered by thirteen per cent of the locals.

Google maps think the pub is a black hole,
A black stole around Ann’s neck helps keep it under wraps,
Traps set for the unsuspecting are spoiled,
Triggered by masochists,
A mass—oh, kissed, one no one missed.

The pub’s décor, once a bore,
Now is no more, following the arsonist’s party.
As for the drinks, their peculiar stinks and fluorescent colours,
They’re cheap aphrodisiacs, expensive anti-emetics and invariably solid.

Hollow alcoholic people lurch like a church with a broken steeple,
On stools where they perch,
Feeling a part of a fashion,
As the weird pub’s popularity grows,
But why it does so, nobody knows.

Ann shocks all when, at forty-nine,
She marries a former milkman,
Who dresses as Queen Elizabeth I,
With the worst thing being,
The throne he’s surgically attached to.

But Ann’s retired milkman is kind,
He’s also clever and good in bed,
People seem to like him, and remember things he said,
Like his warning of the end of Worthing,
Which he foresaw once out of his head.

Ann’s husband glues his statements,
To furniture and people’s clothing,
Ensuring they adhere to his words,
And though many do no one knows his name,
Not even Ann, who thinks he’s called Stu,
But she isn’t sure; in fact she hasn’t a clue.

Anonymity had once been his ambition,
Having been something of his family tradition.
But his years with dairy products have made him hanker for more,
Like self-pasteurisation on the floor.
He’d better leave a note for Ann,
He won’t be seeing her anymore!

ALBERT CAMUS

Did Albert Camus forsake goalkeeping for the attainment of his own personal goals?
Was his brand of absurdist existentialism an own goal?
Was he too nihilistic to believe in anything?
Or are his books misunderstood comedies?
Was he clairvoyant?
Did he stage his death in a manner that anticipates how Marc Bolan, much later, would die?
Did he laugh much or was he often seen to cry?
Pronounced correctly, Albert Camus sounds like a gnu.
Does this make him more readily a popular guru?
Camus remains influential in counter-cultural pockets, predominantly around Europe.
Jean Paul Sartre, for a start, would acknowledge his contemporary—at the time.
Camus wrote about plagues and murder yet never committed a crime.
He wrote of exile, alienation and suicide.
His books are far from cheerful and I have to confide they’ve had me in tears.
AC might be overrated now, but was he recognised by his peers?
Isolated loners arriving in cities to exist as outsiders feature in his work,
Profundity can be the hallmark of a pretentious, shallow, berk.
Was AC a lazy writer? Did he feign illness and shirk?
Where are his hidden meanings? How deeply do they lurk?
Is The Myth of Sisyphus some kind of surreal perk?
Was his understated prose contrived?
Did he steal his philosophy from some oppressed clerk?
Taking advantage of narcoleptics, did AC rise like a lark?
Shaping his stolen material furtively in the dark?
Was he a rare mind with a unique voice, or a soulless operative lacking choice?
Was he as great as (and did he admire) James Joyce?
Was Joyce the real plagiarist—with AC his innocent stooge?
Was he notoriously mean-spirited like Ebenezer Scrooge?
No one really knew Albert Camus; no one really had a clue.
So ignorance of AC is really nothing new,
Life’s futility features in the themes of AC’s material,
If AC visited a contemporary séance, he’d have to be ethereal.
Posthumous acclaim and the scholarly bandying of his name,
Contribute to his fame but to the dead that’s all the same.
The Rebel was one of Camus’ books,
Also it was the title of one of Tony Hancock’s films.
The book deals with murder; while the film should make you laugh.