Alan Gould: Four Frivolities

Four Frivolities

 

1. Ballad for the Fart Tax.

(5/9/2003, Farmers blocked the streets of New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, yesterday in protest at plans to impose the world’s first “fart tax” on livestock flatulence.)

 

PLEEEASE let me pay the fart tax!

It is my bleeding heart tax,

atonement’s brand new start tax.

Please let me pay the fart tax.

 

How can I shirk my guilt.

I’m in it to my hilt.

My anal lilt makes daisies wilt …

It can’t be just the way I’m built.

 

Pleeease let me pay … etc

 

O tax me hard and some

you Greenies glib and glum.

My farts may hum in tweedledum,

but they are minted in MY bum.

 

Pleeease let me pay … etc

 

My klaxon-sounds of air

let me believe I’m where

the munching cows know they arouse

Green wrath in its grim anyhows.

 

Pleeease let me pay … etc.

 

Senators on your benches,

stifling anal clenches,

lest methane’s scent, so vehement,

release its minuscule percent.

 

Pleeease let me pay … etc

 

I MUST yield up my dollars

In sorrow for my squalors,

those tummies airy, unsanitary

that release my sphincter’s fairy.

 

Pleeease let me pay … etc

 

2. A Prefect Recalled

(In this recollection of boarding school 1960, “Noogies” are first formers, “Corner’s” is a boarding house, and “Tombs” its housemaster.)

 

Flob Bicknell was a prowler and the blackest of bête noires,

and his breakfast was a Noogie followed by a strong Gauloise.

He haunted Corner’s corridors like Richard, Duke of Gloucester,

a manner cold beyond the reach of any known defroster.

 

His face was long, his mouth was hard, his eyes were shot with blood,

(Tombs thought he was a dinosaur surviving from The Flood.)

His thoughts were deep as pockets and he had that Crookback hunch;

ingenious the ways he brought a small boy to The Crunch.

 

“Your Noogie is like pond-life in his filth and slimy blob,

and I’m august Flob Bicknell and the Cornerite Nabob.

I pad the ill-lit corridors where nuns were used to glide.

No wheedling known to man will ever win me to your side.

 

“So here’s a tip, don’t give me lip, you Donaldsons and Coates,

Or nitric acid I will funnel down your Noogie throats.

I hear the farts, I know the hearts of all the Briggs and Vizards,

And how to dry then pickle all your sundry brains and gizzards.”

 

Yet in the scheme of Nature here’s a thought should give us pause …

The Flob was Noogie once himself, when Sixth were dinosaurs,

a louse, a mouse of Corner’s House as boyhood grew complex

while quaking in the bootroom from Tyrannosaurus Rex.

 

 

3.Dactyls for the AGW Whinge

(AGW—Anthropogenic Global Warming)

 

O Alan’s Great Whinge is no church,

no creed to leave lads in the lurch.

His whinge does not singe,

nor cause you to cringe,

you’ll believe him yet stay on your perch.

 

O Alan’s Great Whinge is a comet,

enlightenment streaming out from it,

a whinge with no fringe,

or sapping syringe,

and ISIS says, “Keep it! Don’t bomb it.”

 

O Alan’s Great Whinge is a beacon,

no stage where Alan’s unique on

no whinge to unhinge

or cause you to binge,

or offer some feeble critique on.

 

O Alan’s Great Whinge is a terrier

to liven the dogs in the area,

a whinge to impinge

no contrarian twinge,

but assist all our yowls to be merrier.

 

 

4. “Uluru is in The Wet”

(UK News headline)

 

Does Climate lack in etiquette

when Uluru is in The Wet?

Do Warmists working Ozzie sweat

recording glaciers in Tibet

now overcrowd the Internet

as Uluru endures The Wet?

 

Do imams bray from minaret?

Does Tybalt marry Juliet?

And do the Weather-boys regret

they wrote in their on-line gazette

without sufficient tête à tête

that Uluru was in The Wet?

 

If Climate Change has ceased its threat

and every Climate martinet,

now humbled to his silhouette,

must write “No more will we beget

this CO2 catastroph-ette,

but peer with care through our lorgnettes

and write a rueful epithet

on all our former spook and fret

now Uluru is in The Wet.”

 

Alan Gould