read me literal, dear reader
please - for I never transcend
beyond the obvious
I am in the physical, embodied and whole
and so cannot go into things figurative
or metaphorical,
satirical, persona-cast, parodic or symbolic
Irony, I've always known, is some contraption
wrought by an ironsmith

and so to me, dear reader
"He's got the whole world in his hands"
is a ridiculous proposition, makes no sense;
and Isaac Newton was obviously
suffering from concussion
from the literal apple
that hit him ******* his head
when he extemporised:
"If I have seen further it is
by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Bah! Humbug! - a scientist and you believe in giants!
Come on Newton - you're nuts!  Stick to apples!

read me literal, dear reader -
so when I say my wife is an angel
I mean she's dead and she floats around me
making ****** sure I don't get hitched again
till I too become an angel, or fiend,
however it may come to pass;
and the guy who tells me: "Nice day, isn't it"
when it's raining cats and dogs
is obviously some crazy *******

Poet A and Poet B
sat down to a competition
They had to improvise lines
ending in Timbuctoo

And so Poet A improvised with most
elegant and mellifluous voice:
O let us go over the vast oceans
and seek the exotic,  the mysteries
O let us trudge through harsh lands
till we reach the fair and distant Timbuctoo

And Poet B extemporised:
*Tim and I met three fair maidens -
we were eager and they were game too
so  I bucked one and Timbuctoo!

Lances of evening sun run through trails
Left spearheads of gold behind water rails.
The dene smell that came from a hawthorn on
The turn, had lost all its putrid scents
Of spring. Blown in the night, echoed
By the corpses of snowberries, marble
Spoils of fungus adorned the rorqual’s throat
Of ridged bark on the trunk of a fallen
Tree. Two blackbirds in a drunken squabble
Over fermented windfalls, were just missed
By a pushchair where a low flying toddler
Extemporised words into birdlike cries.
An umbrella was caught up and fluttered
To dry its wet wings like a cormorant;
As mopheads in the shrubbery tumbled
From sky hydrangea to rhubarb crumble.