IMP LORE

Imp lore includes a tale of a disabled imp, with a limp and precious ore.
They’re ever attentive listeners, who’ll feign interest when they are bored,
Because they are raised to always be polite,
‘Always be polite,’ they are, by their parents, implored.


Imp lore is obscure, partly for the reason that imps will seldom write.
‘The Bottle Imp’ is a classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson,
But the title imp does not emerge in glory.
They rarely feature in horror films because they are too gory.
I think imps are apolitical, but who knows?
Maybe they vote Tory.


Mischievous imps are commonplace, like sailors with ‘a rolling gait,’
While imps delayed at airports are imps who are made to wait.
It helps them learn to cope with their imp-atience!
Their favourite sweets are mint imperials, which they suck with impish delight.
Imps, generally petite, are hardly heavy, in fact, they’re very light.
They’re not known to be nocturnal, but you can see them at night.


If ‘The Simpsons’ lost an ‘S’, it could easily describe an imp’s male offspring,
I can’t see a person getting animated over this series though, that’s the thing.
I wonder, is the most popular imp-spotting season of the year spring?
Imps sound like pimps, but imps can make prostitutes vanish,
While pimps just make their incomes disappear.


Short-tempered imps, readily taunted, are imps you can easily goad.
A ship’s hold is where I’m told a cruising imp’s stuff is stowed,
To me, imps are awfully precious—they’re worth their weight in gold.
I hope to inspire greater imp awareness in the public with all that I have said.
It is imp-erative that I succeed, or else I will imp-lode,
This explains the urgency of my imp-ulse here to unload.

STATIONER, STATIONARY

Recently retired, the former stationer took up a reclusive existence on a peninsula with an old biro.
With a pen, insular on the peninsula, the solitary stationer that was is virtually stationary.
Still, he manages to reflect on his successful career, knocking out pens and paper and similar gear.

Now, with failing eyesight, he spends his days looking back.
Subsequently, it all becomes clear.
When his biro runs out, he runs out into the sea,
And wonders why Virginia Woolf did the same thing,
As, drowning, he takes a last pee.

FRED, THREADS AND HER

Looming on the horizon,
Blooming cotton—her eyes on,
Stranded at a distance,
Fred’s talk of threads
Are words she can easily follow.
She is a material witness
To the fact that Fred is hollow,
The cotton has him reeling,
Yet she cannot share his feeling.
A memory of cotton mills fills her mind,
Fred needles her but she knows he’s kind,
It was a darn strange thing,
She thinks perhaps Fred’s blind.

He used to have her in stitches,
As a jovial, plump boy in britches.
Now he never makes her smile,
Instead, about him she bitches.
Fred gasps loudly—a sudden stitch in his side,
Her aloofness is something he’s noticed and long denied,
And specifically now ignores out of pride,
Embarrassed enough, for the moment because he has cried.

‘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!

TEN YEARS

A decade is a period of time.

A long time as a deck aid, providing assistance on a ship.

After this time, you feel life had given you the slip—

You feel you have decayed.

Atleast you’ve kept afloat working in this way,

Satisfactorily keeping penury at bay.

But there’s no deck aid parade in addition to your pay.

You drink any port in a storm to keep warm,

Squinting at how the land lay.

At sea or in dock, you watch the clock,

Gazing into the distance for prospects looming on the horizon,

Wondering about your sweetheart back home and who she’s got her eyes on.

At times, with the relentless grind,

You find scenes from Mutiny on the Bounty playing on your mind.

On land, crew cuts are haircuts.

At sea, they are less kind.

Shaking off bits of cut-up crewmembers from your shoe,

You realise no one is more cut off than you.

A deck aid’s neck’s laid out on deck,

It tans to leather in the sun from its fleshy cardboard.

When you’re not seasick, you’re homesick,

Foam is quick to flow from the mouth if you drink too much saltwater,

Apparently, it drives you mad!

Overall, your life’s not bad; just boring, repetitive, tedious and sad.

You’re better off than most, you tell yourself…

With the conviction of a ghost…

THE SAILOR AND THE CARD PLAYER

A sailor was drinking with a card player with a skin complaint.

The player’s hands looked sore and blistered, his fingers swollen with peeling skin and bloated knuckles.

 ‘You’ll be alright, mate,’ the sailor, making light of it, chuckles. ‘Only,’ he frowns at the player’s fingers, ‘how do you think you got it?’

‘I’ll tell you what it wasn’t,’ the player, beginning to explain, frowns. ‘It wasn’t because I shook hands with clowns or wiped them on my dressing gowns…’

The sailor swallowed his drink and after a lengthy pause is on the brink of repeating his question.

But, raising his hands, the player understands.

He decides to put the sailor out of his misery.

‘The plain fact is that contaminated cards are the source of my affliction. I don’t know if they were poisonous or if I am allergic to that specific brand, but I’ll never play with them again!’

‘Fair enough,’ the sailor nods.

‘I’ll tell you this…’ In the air, the player’s podgy finger prods. ‘I won’t touch that pack again, unless I lose my brain, I’m telling you. I’m suffering so badly, I really am in pain!’

The sailor nodded sagely, but he thought his companion was nuts.

‘I’ve made up my mind,’ resumed the player. ‘No ifs, no buts, I’ll not go near those infernal cards ever again!’

‘Well that’s fair enough,’ said the sailor after an awkward silence. ‘One thing’s for sure, mind, this would never have happened to you if you’d been playing cards on board my ship.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘’Cos we always swab the decks, mate,’ the sailor guffawed. ‘We always swab the decks!’

WELL, WELL, WELL

It is better to put things well than put things in a well, where they’d get wet.
You can know full well something’s going on while remaining ignorant of how full a well is.
A successful gambler can win well in Welwyn Garden City without feeling shitty, providing he means well.
Inkwells are old-fashioned and seldom seen nowadays, although there are a few in Staines and Blackpool.
People who ask, ‘Are you keeping well?’ Should, strictly speaking, rephrase the question.
Although I accept they are, generally, well-wishers.
Wishing wells are full of coins but you’d get more money out of oil wells.
One who oils well is unlikely to hear their hinges creak, while painting well in oils falls short of the old masters at their peak.
If you’re ‘welling up’ it means you are close to tears,
Unlike a so-called town crier, who is dry-eyed when he appears.
Well-meaning people don’t mean wells,
Any more than Wells Cathedral is a place of worship for wells.
H. G. Wells wasn’t wells but a writer—still, his words were well chosen.
Ice at the bottom of a well is obviously well frozen.
A bucket dropped to the bottom of an unknown well ‘pails’ into insignificance.
All’s well that ends well is not true for wells.
Oh, well!
There’s no such thing as a well-lit street—wells do not produce a light source.
Equally absurd are the notions of well-built men and well-adjusted children,
Patently, wells are not responsible for a male’s physique or in any way involved with the emotional development of a child.
No doubt many of us are well acquainted with these misleading terms,
People are well advised—not literally—not to take them literally.
The well heeled must find it difficult to walk, however well read they are or well spoken.
As for those who look well preserved, they owe wells no gratitude.
Wells get huge amounts of undeserved credit; something, which I think makes them pretty low.
Ill people don’t literally want to get well soon—it’d be a nuisance and spoil their afternoon.
Anyway, enough’s enough, I’ll finish off now—the subject’s been well covered.

RACIST GENETICIST-NAIVE OR NAZI?

A RACIST GENETICIST HAS MADE CONTROVERSIAL CLAIMS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF BLACK PEOPLE. PROFESSOR I.M. DAAFT SUGGESTS THAT SKIN COLOUR COULD BE DOWN TO A CHROMOSOME HE CLAIMS TO HAVE DISCOVERED, KNOWN AS A MONOCHROMOSOME! IS HE A NAZI OR JUST NAIVE?
Spoof headline #3.

MINELLI-YUM! ROBBIE DATES LIZA AT SWISH RESTAURANT

ROBBIE WILLIAMS HAS BEEN SPOTTED WITH HOLLYWOOD LEGEND LIZA MINELLI AT A POSH NOSH OUTLET IN LA
Spoof headline #1.