A Single Fish For Artifice Poem by jim hogg

Where are your warlike lovers, love,
and your sensitive fighters, now?
Arse-gallons under the turf mush.
Tokers are gaga too and pout

like no yesterday's left unstoned.
They've always striven to be good -
imagining themselves enthroned,
but not mislaid in Auden's wood.

And so they hang, about our piers.
All mimicry, all feeble grips.
The curse of evolution smears,
in eyes and grasping fingerslips.
This dancing stuff: it's all for what?
A splinter in your poodle's paw.

So fly, and pull the stops all out:
that Kangaroo has quite a clout.
Berate the waves and flush the cave,
we've seen the bust; we're cutting loose;
the Marigolds don't need a shave,
and Corybant has coshed the goose.

He read a single line and left
a one word sketch to net the mind,
where meaning's fled and might be dead.
It's rumoured that The Golden Hind

has had enough of human stuff,
of modes and means and mines and may
wax corybantic with her club,
over the halls and Faraday.