‘Analphabeta...’

‘Aie – Aie – Aie!
Please sir, your thumbs are through my windpipe, sir!’
– Browning, Mr Sludge,‘The Medium’

after Tibor Soustal

‘Analphabeta,
muse of creative writing
courses, hail! patron
of scribblers no one wants to
publish (and that’s just the prof) –’

*
jots bored hourly-paid
teacher stuck with ‘life writing’
for non-readers, man’s
inhumanity to the
humanities come to this.

*
Workshop by workshop
instalments proceed apace
of The Sword of Drax,
a tale of who-gives-a-fuck
inspired by Christ-make-it-stop.

*
Congratulations,
friend, on your PhD by
novel. It remains
unpublishable. But did
Tolstoy have a PhD?

*
‘Dear Minimum Wage-
provider’ (mentally drafts
reference, one more
debt-crippled, fobbed-off, naive
poor innocent off his hands.)

*
A visiting bard,
drunk, spins a tale of what he’d
like to do to ‘that
cunt’ reviewer: livelier
by far than his wilting verse.

*
‘Over the weekend’
(mentally fills out report
on conference in
Derby) ‘I shared best practice,
a drinks tab, body fluids...’

*
Lingering late on
the library’s abandoned
classics floor he weeps,
pens hexameters to the
muse of illiteracy.