Midnight poetry symposium

Poets will go on and on
They have the stamina to fight
After all the rest have gone

Some praise Chaucer, some praise Donne
Living rivals are heaped with spite
Poets will go on and on

Being brief is seldom done
They drone their woes into the night
After all the rest have gone

"Publishing is one big con
The money making grip's too tight"
Poets will go on and on

Booker, Costa, Orange won,
For novelists the future's bright
After all the rest have gone

They argue over who should write
They have the stamina to fight
Poets will go on and on
After all the rest have gone


25/9/10

The importance of clear thinking

What happens in vagueness
Stays in vagueness

Poets don't jog

Poets don't jog
You don't hear their footsteps coming from out of the morning fog
Not for them the red-faced gasping staggering slog

Poets don't jog
They'll still be in bed at midday sleeping like a log
Or face down on the sofa among the empties snoring like a hog

Poets don't jog
They're blearily looking through the kitchen for breakfast stuff to make their arteries clog
Or holding wine bottles up to the light in search of dregs so they can have the hair of the dog

Poets don't jog

Kipling on management

"If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you"
Rudyard Kipling, If ...

If you can keep your job when all about you
Are losing theirs and rightly blaming you
If you can fake sincerity when men doubt you
And make them suffer for their doubting too
If you can apologise for keeping someone waiting
But delay them further by your lies
And seem good natured while secretly hating
The well-informed, the gentle and the wise

If you can plot - to overthrow your master
If you can snipe - without bothering to aim
If you can meet with Chaos and Disaster
And treat those two co-workers just the same
If you thrill to hear your name is spoken
Feted by dolts and praised by fools
And insist on fixing things that are not broken
Or, failing, turn around and blame your tools

If you can steal the balance of the Lotto winnings
And fire someone without giving a toss
If you can stall an initiative's beginnings
And ensure the outcome's total loss
If you can do without backbone or sinew
And leave a mess behind you when you've gone
If you can kill all honesty within you
And focus everything on Getting On

If you can reject all impulses to virtue
Poison every task with leprous touch
Ensure that all of those that hurt you
End up hurt themselves at least as much
If you can fill each unproductive minute
With a critique of how the firm is run
And forget the part that you play in it-
You will be a Manager, my son.

Welsh traditions

Knowing more about rugby than the WRFU
Using three words when one word would do

Forming a committee to get something done
Pooling the talents and wasting each one

And when it goes wrong to everyone's shame
A nation united in apportioning blame

from Bede's History of the English Church (2006 edition)

One sin at a time

On the conscience of St Augustine
Was much that was simply disgusting
He started to worry
And so he said sorry
For it all, apart from the lusting


Many are called, few are chosen

The thing about St Benedict
Was his Rule was incredibly strict
For each one he monked
Ten novices flunked
And out from the abbey were kicked


Against gluttony

Ascetic Thomas Aquinas
Always avoided large dinners
To others who'd fast
He'd say "You won't last:
You're amateurs, only beginners".


Incarnation

According to Cardinal Newman
God, granting salvation to Man,
Smiled on the godly
And damned those who oddly
Insisted His Son's only human


Defending the faith

Henry called the Papal Nuncio
An idiot and a duncio
Enraged, he said
"I'll chop off your head!
I've done it before, more than once-i-o!"


Gently does it

Inquisitorial Torquemada
Gave advice to his torturing cadre
"If they won't confess
You just have to press
On their conscience a little harder"


Schism

Martin Luther's 95 theses
Broke the Christian world in pieces
The question was if
The Roman Pontiff
Oversaw the whole of the species

Ars Poetica: Horace got back

The glory of Horace will never pass:
His elegant poetica, his incomparable ars.

The minister

Whose drive to succeed
Overrode every need?
Who schemed and plotted
And promptly forgot it?
Who drafted the laws
To milk most applause?
Who signed his name
But refused any blame?
Who crossed the line
And had to resign?
Who used to be feared
Then just disapperaed?
--The Minister

A short history of Wales

As glaciers crept around Paviland Cave
We laid our first leader in his grave

We prised the Preseli bluestones free
Sent them to Stonehenge over the sea

The Roman soldier oiled his curls
Didn't bother with local girls

Arthur's veins ran with royal blood
Made a palace of sticks and mud

Rebecca's children have grown up wrong
Drunk on story, myth and song

The millennium dawns on Cardiff Bay
A nation reborn, or so they say