Tug Dumbly # 69 - One Version of Les

One Version of Les

What’s going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution

– Constantine Cavafy

Your bullied childhood your moneymaker,

embunkered otherness a blanket,

burred about you by your beloved nanny,

Nurse Grievance, flopping out her trusty old
dugs to be suckled yet again, way beyond

the age of consent, two frothing jugs,

bile and honey, poison next to cure,

one expressing a dairy of dissent,

the other drugging away the pain.

She soothes you to sleep with fairy tales,

fables grim to whet the spade,

to dig the trench to send periscopes

up all those sweaty academics  

and desperado intellectuals   

scoping you from their towers,

all those elites howling for your scalp,

stalking your corpus down Escher halls

of privilege and power.

Christ, what if the unthinkable happened, Les

and the barbarians cancelled the gig,

threw in the towel on pillaging Bunyah,

slapped ya back, said good on ya,

even worse, dared to love ya?

Jeeze, maybe someone blundered.

What if the enemy didn’t exist,

or had done a Gallipoli flit,

pulled out on the sly, leaving you squeezing

a figment of thistle in each clenched fist,

howling at a bucolic sky?

No lie, Les, but could be,

apart from the odd angry scribbler –  

the Last Tasmanian Poet gone feral,

carrying on a futile Thylacine resistance –

the Huns and Vandals have abandoned

their advance on your books.

Their Hercules couldn’t brook your tortoise

over the distance, you set to mean a slog.

(Though the animal could be wrong –

Jeremiah was a bullfrog).

To make more shrapnel of metaphor,

maybe your Turk has crept to their trench

to find nothing but gifts – chocolate bars

of critical acclaim: ‘Attaboy Ataturk

your salvos won the day!’

You stormed Normandy without casualty,

took Troy without a horse,

the fortress doors of Academia

are unguarded and swinging wide:

‘but come inside, you’re on the course!’

The chatterers and cultural pashas

offer garlanded entrées,  

Chairs bestrewn with posies, in

lecture halls bedecked with bouquets.

On a laurel sash pinned a note:

‘sorry we missed you.
Just popped down to the shop

for your latest anthology.

Make yourself at home –

we’ve drugged the dogs, drained the moat.

Everyone’s dying to meet you

if you haven’t another appointment …’

Fuck, what a fly in the ointment.

Universally lauded.

How dare they queer your disappointment!

But how ‘bout this Les –

if you finally win the Dynamite Prize

don’t chase us like the loaded dog.

Just accept our surrender.

You won the war, unconditionally, even.

Though she still won’t like the terms

your old Nanny, Nurse Grievance.