waylaid

Bloody men are like bloody buses — You wait for about a year And as soon as one approaches your stop Two or three others appear. You look at them flashing their indicators, Offering you a ride. You're trying to read the destinations, You haven't much time to decide. If you make a mistake, there is no turning back. Jump off, and you'll stand there and gaze While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by And the minutes, the hours, the days. Wendy Cope

The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized And sits in piles in a police warehouse, My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs. Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles One passes down reflecting on life's vanities, Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book -- For behold, here is that book Among these ranks and banks of duds, These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns Of complete stiffs. The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I rejoice. It has gone with bowed head like a defeated legion Beneath the yoke. What avail him now his awards and prizes, The praise expended upon his meticulous technique, His individual new voice? Knocked into the middle of next week His brainchild now consorts with the bad buys The sinker, clinkers, dogs and dregs, The Edsels of the world of moveable type, The bummers that no amount of hype could shift, The unbudgeable turkeys. Yea, his slim volume with its understated wrapper Bathes in the blare of the brightly jacketed Hitler's War Machine, His unmistakably individual new voice Shares the same scrapyart with a forlorn skyscraper Of The Kung-Fu Cookbook, His honesty, proclaimed by himself and believed by others, His renowned abhorrence of all posturing and pretense, Is there with Pertwee's Promenades and Pierrots-- One Hundred Years of Seaside Entertainment, And (oh, this above all) his sensibility, His sensibility and its hair-like filaments, His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one With Barbara Windsor's Book of Boobs, A volume graced by the descriptive rubric "My boobs will give everyone hours of fun". Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also, Though not to the monumental extent In which the chastisement of remaindering has been meted out To the book of my enemy, Since in the case of my own book it will be due To a miscalculated print run, a marketing error-- Nothing to do with merit. But just supposing that such an event should hold Some slight element of sadness, it will be offset By the memory of this sweet moment. Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets! The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am glad. Clive James

Me up at does out of the floor quietly Stare a poisoned mouse still who alive is asking What have i done that You wouldn't have e.e. cummings

Love again: wanking at ten past three (Surely he's taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words? Isolate rather this element That spreads through other lives like a tree And sways them on in a sort of sense And say why it never worked for me. Something to do with violence A long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity. Philip Larkin

Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed oh Lana Turner we love you get up Frank O'Hara