Long, long before Carol Ann Duffy was even the smallest and most inconsequential piece of grit in the oyster of her adoring mother's eye, Dame Polly Syllabix was lying, frolicking, on her back, amidst the golden wheat fields of Swaledale, rhapsodizing to the stars.

Over the years those rhapsodies, little by little, became enclosed in stiff boards. Books of poems followed books of poems, as impressive, in their way, as the Chinese army. Some time later - the chronology becomes a little fuzzy at this point - she was appointed Poet Laureatesse of England, and that is what, deep in our hearts, she will always remain - in spite of all loose talk to the contrary.

This evening, here in the basement of the Dover Street Arts Club, we are proud to present to you, rather as the gorgeous Salomé once presented John the Baptist to an unsmiling King Herod, the greatest star in England's ever undimmed poetic firmament, the truly inestimable Dame Polly Syllabix…

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Our Dear Laureatesse Speaks  

Ladies and Gentlemen and Asbo Escapees - there are many such amongst my acolytes - it is such a pleasure, once again, for you to have me amongst you like some god parachuted into your midst from one of Prince Andrew's fleet of frisky-winged choppers.

This evening, for your delectation, and at the express  request of Michael Glover, that brutish, undersea editorial mechanism which continues to propel The Bow-Wow Shop along to some as yet thrillingly unrecognizable destination, I shall be reading a wide selection of verses from my collected poems of 732 pages in the octavo. Not the book in its entirety, you will be disappointed to learn, but a damned good gobbet of the same.

It is so difficult for me to choose from amongst the many thousand upon thousand of poems that I have written. They all pull at my voluminous skirts, saying: mama, darling mama, please choose me! Please favour me. I am more beautiful, surely, than all the poxy rest!

Ah, my poems! They make such demands upon me, and especially before I have written them. They are like fields of wheat, or, to be more imagistically particular, great fleshy ears of ripening corn, a-bristle in the wind, bowing before the wind, stretching across the ancestral acres of Swaledale, until they reach the unfathomable abyss of the North Sea, where they swim and they swim, so madly gay.

Some, alas, do not swim at all. They drown into the full depths of themselves, only to re-emerge, years later, utterly transmogrified. Some even emerge back to front, horribly swollen, like some Darwininan impossibility. Those ones I have loosely categorized, for the sake of convenience, as modernist.

And yet choose I must, a few, a very, very few, from amongst the teeming, clamorous many. After all, I cannot expect you to sit here until Sunday, though you yourself may wish to do so.  When I asked that gorgeous niggard Michael Glover whether he would consider feeding and watering us for ninety-six hours on the trot, he carefully laid aside his brimming flute of Bollinger and spewed, quite speedily, into an ice-bucket. Frankly, there is no possibility of an extended performance. And so, if you did want one of those, leave now. Go on. What are you waiting for? I jest, of course. Who in his right mind would ever wish to absent himself from such a performance as this one?

I shall read three from amongst the six hundred or so that I might have read. They are all much of a muchness, to be perfectly frank. Genius is genius, no matter on what level it chooses to operate, whether from the murky depths of some rat-infested basement in Clapham or the gleaming Porsche-friendly penthouse suite of some club in Mayfair. A great, resonant poem is always the same poem, no matter what the crack into which it may have been stuffed.

Here is the first one, fresh plucked from my deep velour hat - oh how I love that word velour. Velour. Velour.  It caresses, so winningly, the back of the throat, almost as if about to seize and strangulate! The poem itself is a lament for the passing of a dear, sometime friend. I refer, of course, to that fizzing amber jeroboam of pure outrage, Emelia Fanhart, with whom I used to crawl the bars of Soho when the mood ratcheted us up - oh those hours of intense, booze-fuelled hyperactivity, at the Colony, in the company of Muriel and Francis, that greasy little dauber, with his nasty leathers and the pastiche Elvis lick. Oh how we loved to hate him when the champagne and the vomit flowed in just about equal measure. Oh those dear, gone days, days of such shameful heroics!

And here is the poem, at last. It is called 'Lament for Emelia, which is pretty well what you might have expected, given its subject.

Lament for Emelia

Emelia Fanhart, poetaster to Roger the Regent,

Lately bedded down in timely fashion.

Pure fabrication from toe to top knot.

What a grind of a damsel,

   freakish little termagant!

Lately come and so soon gone -

Oh how we loved you, Emelia Fanhart…

In box as stout as the legs within,

Four great men groaned to carry her out…

O farewell, Emelia, god speed thee thitherward -

Lotus flowers for luncheon, candy floss

   for breakfast!

I shall read just two more. I would not wish to exhaust the patience of my audience. Nor would I wish to be parted from my glass for longer than was absolutely necessary, and it is, frankly, so difficult to apply oneself seriously to the balm of drink when words, in a very particular order, are being spouted fast and loose as water gushing wantonly from a faucet. I am sure we are all in agreement on that one.

But before I do so, I should like to thank you for giving me the privilege, as your Poet Laureatesse, of being amongst you this evening. It is as if some immortal has hiked down in his stout wingéd boots from the dizzying heights of Mount Olympus to be here, you must have been thinking to yourself.

When you all chose me to be the People's Poet Laureatesse, the poetess of all your hearts, the choice cannot have been an easy one for you. There were many other contenders, with their sweaty, drooling jowls, all straining and rattling at the gate, desperately clutching at their reams of unutterable nonsense. I tell you it was not an easy choice for that raddled bunch over at the palace either but, just between the two of us, I give not a mouse's fart for their opinions. They have no opinions. They are walking ventilator shafts, horribly, horribly rusted.

So this is my last poem, and it is amongst my favourites. There are always so many, clamouring for attention, as I have already told you, saying: choose me tonight, dearest mama, do I not look absolutely gorgeous this evening, tricked out in all these fancy adjectival clauses?

I slap them down, quite brutally, when they do that, because I know who they are. I know them of old. They are the weak ones, the ones that should never have inveigled their way into the collected poems anyway.

This poem is not one of those bad, unruly ones. This poem is one of my crowning glories, one of the longest and most resplendent plumes in my heterogeneous literary headgear.

And, once again, it was set in motion by memories of a sometime friend - some husband, like a great barred gate, came between us - and it was she who gave the poem its title. The title itself was her one-word response to the poem when I read it to her. It is called, quite simply, quite laconically, Consternation.

Consternation

Sophia, she who sits behind me,

Brings out the best in all my ecstacies.

Landscapes unfurl, the gentle remembrance

   of tolled bells…

Life itself is a kind of hell.

Sophia, she who plays with my smile,

Has happened upon a certain way of knowing.

The bat-batting of eye lids. Extensions of the fingers.

Nothing else lingers.

Sophia, she who courts my image,

Eludes me ceaselessly, on every corner.

I take my dowsing rod. I go to find her.

Oh disabling nativity of late December!

May the blessings of poetry remain with you for just as long as you choose to provide for yourselves from the groaning store of good things to be found in the latest issue of The Bow-Wow Shop.

And my blessings upon Michael Glover, too, should he still be upright and relatively coherent..