Even as Trump forms a committee to Steal America’s Future, Again, (SAFA,) my mother has summoned a council of war to oppose him. While he may have a monstrous regiment of billionaires and bullies, she has only me. In truth, my position is a lowly one, that of a springboard, a listener to political editorials, half-written letters of protest and, lately, I’ve become her poetry critic.
Not being up on satirical poetry, or indeed poetry in general, you might think that recruiting me to her team was a huge mistake, and you would be right; but needs must: even if I am to poetry, what lead is to flight.
Hearing the first lines of The Daffodils still causes me to fall into a post traumatic state; sweat breaks out, I’m ten-years-old again, head down on my desk as verbal shrapnel flies overhead, spewed like molten lava from my teacher’s mouth. Suddenly, my heart needs a defibrillator to kick-start it back into action, and a pacemaker is required to steady its erratic beat. I fared better with Ode to a Nightingale, suicide contemplation, even in poetry, seemed cool during my slouching teens, it was something my darker self could at least understand. The fact that a poet had accidentally touched my imagination seemed ironic to me, but these are some the contradictions in life that one must learn to live with, I reckoned. Shakespeare had one or two grim sonnets which also appealed to my teenage self, even if the rhyming scheme passed me by.
“No longer mourn for me when I am dead…” What a first line! Way to go, Willy.
Wonder how he would fare with a limerick about Trump. You see, limericks are my mother’s chosen form of poetry, her weapon of choice when it comes to dealing with this would-be tyrant.
What SNL failed to do over four years using satire, and what CNN failed to achieve with reasoned argument, my mother aims to do using the humble Limerick. Unseating a sitting president is never easy, but a well-aimed Limerick, she reckons, can do more harm to his seat of power than a direct hit from a ballistic missile on his new forever home, the White House. However, right from the get-go there is a problem. Try rhyming the word orange with anything vaguely derogatory, or anything at all, and you will see where the issue lies. Thus skin-tone comparisons are immediately off the table. To have such a soft target already closed off to us is like losing the first battle. One can already feel the whole globe shake under the weight of tanks on the move. So, where does that leave us? What frantic whispering can be heard coming from the direction of the situation room?
Traditionally limericks are hard-hitting, filthy poems, shared between men at the bar. Normally, the first line includes a person and where they hail from. A policeman from Limerick Junction, for instance. But what about him? That’s when things get tricky. The politically correct police would be on my tail if I were to say more about this flatfoot’s condition. Let’s just say that it’s not complementary and it concludes with the line, by the judicious use of his truncheon. As you will understand, the last line, the punch line, should be cringe worthy in content and the rhyming is allowed to go very awry if needed.
So far, all this non-poet has learned about limericks is that they go roughly like this.
Di doodly doodly doo doo
Di doodly doodly doo doo,
Di doodly Doo,
Di doodly Doo,
Di doodly doodly doo doo.
So far so good. All we need is a good first line and we’re off. The problem, however, is that at first my mother could only equate the future president with Donald Duck. Her first stab at a limerick gave us this first line, ‘When the US elected a duck.’ There can be only one way to finish this limerick, one last word is begging to be used, and it begins with the letter F.
Here is an example of my mother’s writing style. She wrote this limerick, and shared it with me while we mulled over the F word situation.
When they made the wolf whistle a crime
Which engendered a terrible fine
If you think it’s a joke
You can’t really be woke
Or maybe you’re just asinine
My mother, after reciting her limerick and giving some further thought to the Donald project, had a couple of glasses of wine before deciding that the word which rhymed best with duck was too arty an ending for her likes, so she turned to a new line of attack.
His supreme orangeness now seemed to offer my mother an enormous target until I pointed out that the only word which it rhymed with was sporange; a sort of sex sack for fungi, a cell filled with spores. While Trump might be easily confused with a giant orange fungal scrotum, drawing people’s attention to this fact might put people permanently off their food. However, this was not the reason my mother dropped orange from her limerick arsenal, it was the thought of finding a word which might rhyme with sporange.
The following was a peace offering on my part as I seemed to have turned from a springboard into a wet blanket out to smother the flame of inspiration. My efforts were immediately rejected as being too clean, not satirical enough, and off brand.
There was a man on the edge of senility,
Who disdained every form of civility,
His wives were all foreign,
His sons very common,
And his brain was devoid of activity.
My mother had a point, so I had another go, shoehorning the word orange into this limerick.
When the electorate went for orange hair
The Vance ticket completed the pair
With chaos in mind
And his massive behind
All his allies he drove to despair
However, this again failed to impress. I was told that it lacked branding and was not very funny. The name, the towers, the Kitch were all missing. And they all had so much you could ridicule. We compromised to arrive at this…
When MAGA went out voting for Trump
Like lemmings getting ready to jump
Their minds were confused
And religious zeal oozed
And their orange Buddha gave us the hump
So much for branding. Not exactly an inspiring success. Having failed thus far, we revisited the duck motif with a view to keeping it clean. Can any fun come from such a thought? Possibly not.
When America elected a duck,
His bestie was known as a schmuck,
This rich billionaire,
Who jumped high in the air,
Was soon deemed China’s best luck
With such poor results we have decided to retire from the battlefield for now. If only Edward Lear was around to inspire us to greater effort on the nonsense front, but alas he is not. That does not mean that my mother is putting away her writing pad. She can still be seen walking around the sitting room, muttering half-heard limericks to herself. With any luck, inspirational lightening will strike, and Duck Ala Orange will give way to a limerick of the first order. We can only hope. However, if anybody has a limerick on White House affairs they need to share, please do.