INTANGIBLE HERDIDATABLES

The ground beneath
creaking, breaking
crumpling, crumbling
subsiding.

Silenced.

Listening
to the glistening

resisting an urge to muster
master
the lustre of an iridescent bubble
French finished and Polish polished
abolished with a colloquial
“right?”

Left
beneath
behind the shed
beyond the hedge

apprehending

a trembling butterfly keeling over
- and under -
faltering, sauntering
scrumbling, tilting
doubling back
skimming

your feet, which
demurely declining dancing
prance, scamper, skip sway

(supicious? precious!)

surreptitiously
stubbornly suggesting,
“surely scrambling,”

senselessly staggering
tottering
thumping.

Suddenly

reclining

faint-hearted
heavy-hearted
heavy-handed

on the ground beneath

which troublingly
persistently rumbles.

Collapsing
sending
your feet
beneath

tumbling, plummeting

reconnoitring encountering
hurtling into -
head-first, head-over-heels -
one head-strong Caplet, André.

Difficult to overlook
a handsome devil
exhibiting in a short
half round
red silk-lined
cape

insinuating
an unusual talent for
collaborating
in a suicide pact

inviting, declaiming indeed
- in instrumentally innovative
poorly orchestrated half-rhymed couplets –

♪♫ “Follow me, follow me, come let us couple together. Have,
an orgy with oval-shaped sugar-coated caplets my love”♪♫

all the while wallowing
up to his neck in the rubble
lining the hollow
beneath your feet.

Hallucinating,
dreaming dumb bunnies above ground
break their fast, eat breakfast
served sunny side up,
with past their sale-by-date
- at the end of their shelf-life -
sorry apologies for spud(s)
supplied by speculative
shifty Squirrel Skrumshuss
(spelt Scrumptious)

sequestered and supplemented only
yesterday using a mechanical lever
(age old trick) serving merely to multiply
predictable losses tomorrow.
The Turf Accountants advise the handicap
- owing to the Cut in the Ground -
is anticipated hard going, despite watering down

and out.

Watch him go:
André Caplet’s off
disciplining his bicycle
with a slender flexible switch
swoosh, swoosh, swoosh

pedalling selectively
slowly homeward
gingerly avoiding the potholes
the pitfalls and the Land Mines

still wittering
assuming, optimistically,
there’ll be Tomatoes still for tea
that the tomahawk’s due still at three

but salad days won’t come again:
he’s late, he’s late for the tête-à-tête
with a Master Ram’s Fabulous Dancing Feet
who can’t wait, won’t wait

to scrap a plan
play it by the book
ensure this pupil can tell
his left foot from her right.

Preferring,
with sugar and straw
committal.

Sentencing a life-time’s
one-and-two and one-and-two;

to eternally, everlastingly
expediently, effortlessly

career and skitter
slither and slip-slide
with the coloured girl, June
and a dwarf, named Eustace

over the slippery ground
beneath their exhausted feet


© Sophia Roberts
All rights reserved