! You Couldn'T Make It Up... Poem by Michael Shepherd

Morning newspapers exist
to bring us spluttering outrage
at the breakfast table, Soggies
splattered over our office gear...

but sometimes they have it
handed to them on a plate...

our finest universities,
concerned at the drop-out rate
of students who just can't cut it
(or perhaps, cut it just too much...)

are considering in their donnish wisdom
whether to postpone essential lectures
to the afternoon... and this
will dropp the drop-out rate? ...

the afternoons - when healthy students
take their exercise outdoors,
budding actors have rehearsals,
libraries are visited,
clubbers wake to check their evening's gear...
and those precious foreign students
who pay for their tuition, wonder if they'd
have done better just to stay at home...

somehow, this problem never arose
when college gates were locked at midnight;
but then was then and now is now...
fortunately, it won't affect
the research for my doctorate
in Youth Culture Studies...