Luke Edley

A satirical poem about the EU referendum. Written by Luke Edley.      

“En garde! To the polling booth!
Blow dust off cavalier hats!”
rants ol’ pinstripe swivel eyes
twiddling an imaginary ‘tache.
“Let’s raise our swords by jingo,
our memories medium rare,
one hundred per cent British beef,
a sirloin made of air.”

Tucking into dripping
a gravy boat spills forth
with a brigade of ageing dullards,
their hip bones battle-worn.
The brain cells brush
like leg hairs bristle
on the bluebottle fly
and pot bellies burst with brandy
exhorting the end is nigh.

“We Brexiteers must spit feathers,”
seethes a tar-black tongue,
telling tales from the coal-face
of a filthy immigrant thumb.
“They hitch-hike on the autobahn
stinkin’ of foreign climes.
If you ask me we should stick ’em
where the sun don’t bloody shine.
Keep ’em off our village greens,
no tents pitched on our lawn,
no food should be fed to ’em
just let ’em eat frog spawn.”

The flowers adorn pub vases
their roots forgotten seeds
once scattered across bomb sites
like the Blitz once destroyed dreams.
In the razed streets and the rubble
the boomers were at play:
“Unthinkable as it is,” says he,
“those were the good old days!
Let’s bring back gallows; kill the queers;
garrotte the pinkoes in great haste;
and slice off the orphans’ noses
to spite the terrorists’ face.”

This fever’s turning purple,
its guile on a rosy cheek,
state pensions wreaking fury
on the mild and the meak.
“I’d give me last penny,”
says a cobweb-haired old crone,
“to wind the clock back to when
England was my home.
Now it’s full of poofters,
curry scents and coloured skin.
I’d prefer it if we had
an oven to put ’em in.”

The racists jeer while the barman
checks a dirty £5 note.
Her Majesty’s aloofly staring back,
her silence a casting vote.
“The Queen, gord bless ‘er,” comes a voice,
“Give ‘er the keys to number ten.
She’d sort this foreign thuggery out
and then she’d bring back hanging.”

A Grandfather clock
chimes in the corner
time sucked from a moth-bitten rug,
as the toxic smog of xenophobes
begs us to pull the plug:
its fumes preach euthanasia
to induce our mongrel nation
with sermons of infernal matricide
by clerics with brain dysplasia.

And as the handcart in hell’s corridor
ignites with an ‘X’ in a box,
we weigh up our country’s remedy:
one of vaccine, one of pox.

© 2016 Luke Edley

END

Image © Abi Begum (nwhomebuyers.co.uk), licensed for reuse and modification under a Creative Commons license.