Dame Polly Syllabix, Poet Laureatesse of England, writes an open letter to her ever loyal band of acolytes
This catastrophe notwithstanding, and thanks to the ever gushing fount of my boundless creativity, the light of poetry still blazes on - methane-, will'o-the-wispishly- bright - of an evening, in the rolling meadows of Swaledale, where I continue to sit, perched high on my ancestral seat, sleek as Teddy's attent thrush caught in the fine sightlines of my paedophiliac uncle's rusting, double-barrelled shot gun, and to rant and expostulate in the strictest of measures known to woman, beneath the ever attentive - and ever expectant - stars.
Several volumes have rolled and dribbled and rocketed from my pen in those intervening months, and every long line from every last poem of them has been swift, delicate and sweetly attuned to the human heart. You will know them, those recent poems of mine - 'Call her Lucretia for want of better', for example, crafted in those oh so slippery hendecasyllabics that I generally have at my disposal of a winter evening. You will have them by heart, these unforgettable poems of mine, I know that for a heart-stopping truth. Like a generous smearing of sticky Araldite across the full, peacockish spread of the finger ends, they will have warmly and tenaciously adhered to you.
Yes, my poems will be as close to you as those first words of dearest mamma were to me, when she chastened me as a child for interrupting, with my eagerly skipping rhymester's words, the regular sinking of bottles of gin and bitters of an evening, beside the parlour window seat, where she was wont to stagger and to lean, releasing air from every identifiable public outlet.
How I still feel the hot imprint of her hand upon my cheek, that delicate slicing motion that she had - down, down it came through the gusting air! - as she spat out the furious lemon pips into my tearful, blinking eye with the full force of the gatling gun… Yes, that is when the verses first came gushing forth from me, like a succession of irresistible, unquenchable, unstuffbackable infant tsunamis. I had to rush away to deal with them, to ask the boy out in the piggery for a pencil and paper. He was always so alert with the pen and the paper, that stub-fingered, brown-fingered yokel, no matter that he dribbled and drooled and had a stupid grin, that latter day son of John Clare. He had words flowing from him too, that boy, local words for such pastoral matters as straw-birth, tussockings and scoop-groinings, some quite mysteriously edifying too.
Not quite on a level with my words though. Ah, those infantile burblings of mine, so culturally high-toned, so cunningly crafted, so outrageously ahead of themselves… Yes, even as a red-cheeked babe, I had the gift to cause men, boys, and even horribly mewling ill-favoured babes, to pause in the street and look, and look again, when they heard me intone, so flutingly. Yes, it was more precious even than some priceless cremonese instrument, that mere voice of mine, even then…
Here it is then, without further ado…
Call Her Lucretia
Call her Lucretia for want of better
When the lights flood on and expose all her fetor
To the eyes of the world and the eyes of the pussies
Who curl by her ankles to mimic the hussy..
Yes, call her Lucretia for want of better.
The taller she grew, the more became lesser -
Those nails on her fingers, so hard, sharp and horny,
The teeth in her mouth, snappy-snapped as a warning
To lovers and friends and various others
To stay far away or suffer the bloodlust
Of Lucretia, the fiercest virago in Clapham,
Where the dogs fly throatward, and bald men
creep after...