Poetry

Stone Variations; Fancy Flattery

John Whitworth

 Stone Variations

 

He moved by night. He went alone.

He crept through corridors of stone

Into her reveries of bone.

 

He’d drawn a blank. The bird had flown.

His friends were fled, his cover blown

And this time he was on his own.

 

In Peter’s Chair the Pope was Joan.

She cursed him in an undertone:

You reap the crap that you have sown.

 

He wouldn’t listen to the crone.

He heard his own testosterone.

Out there beyond the panic zone

 

The night was right as pheromone,

A scattering of starlight thrown

Across the void of the unknown,

 

The wind became a sousaphone

Beneath the howling of the drone,

His homicidal chaperon.

 

Her wildernesses overgrown,

Her staunch, indomitable moan,

He guessed, though he was never shown.

 

He moved by night. He went alone.

 

Fancy Flattery

 

You are so very wonderful,

So no way botch and blunderful,

Your fame so full and thunderful,

    I worship at your shrine.

All excellence is made of you,

I kiss the very shade of you,

I swear I am afraid of you

    And yet I wish you mine.

 

I scorn all filthy flattering,

The barren verbal battering

And lamentable nattering

    That prattles just to please.

I’d fight the knights of Malory,

Refuse a banker’s salary,

Subsist on half a calorie,

    I swear upon my knees.

 

Your Love is as imperious

As Nero or Tiberius,

And makes me so delirious

    That no-one else will do.

The whole wide world your oyster is.

You’d make a bishop boisterous.

No monk would tarry cloisterous

    If he could be with you.