Caligula At The Comedy Store Poem by Richard George

It was banter, knockabout -
'I've had your wife', to senators
who wished I'd died of that fever.
I think I was quite restrained.

If students remember nothing else,
it's the seashells. But *I* wasn't mad.
An army - afraid of water?
'If you want work for sissies', I said,
'you can have it. Make yourselves necklaces'.

I went too far though. First to admit.
The night I beat that singer to death
I was so out of it - hash in the wine.
Looking back, I shudder.

That, I suppose, was the problem.
You can't be Peter Cook as Clive
and have infinite power.
Vespasian - now there was an emperor.
Face like shitting marble.
Funny, then,
that what killed him was diarrhoea.