Friday, December the 3rd, 2010

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O Baleful Pig

O baleful pig! With your look of reproach, you fill me with feelings of guilt. And so I've embroidered the image of you upon my tattered quilt. Yes, it is tattered, yes, it is torn, and my sewing is shoddy and frayed. You look more like a moorhen or even a goat-boy disporting himself in a glade. I spread out the quilt for my kinsfolk to see and they mocked my hamfisted cross-stitch. Aunt Mab bundled it up and carried it off and tossed it into a ditch. So your imperfect image lies soaked in a puddle, O baleful, baleful pig! And I blame myself and my cackhanded ways and I sob as I light up a cig. And I puff on my cig at the edge of the ditch and remember your low mordant grunting when you stood on your plinth at the champion pig fair ‘neath a string of shabby old bunting. I sewed that too, and it showed, it was tatty and filthy and stained and made out of rags, when I was a convict and should have been using my needle in sewing up mail bags. They let me out in time to see you win the prize you hated winning. And now within my head I hear relentless dinning, dinning, the dinning of the rain pour down on my pig picture sewn from thread, oh badly sewn, I know, with cotton cerulean blue and red. A blue-red pig? Or is it a goat-boy? Or a moorside bird? They mock. Your heart was weak. When they made you champ, it cracked. You died of shock/ O baleful pig, R.I.P. I buried you under the Joshua tree.