Tony Beyer


The bar


if George A Custer
had played his cards right
defeated the Sioux
and made it back

to St Louis in time
for the Democratic convention
he might have been
a Presidential candidate

completely unqualified of course
but as one author suggests
no worse than any of the incumbents
in the later nineteenth century

and considering how low
the bar is set at present
he’d be a shoo-in
dead or alive



Edwardian


at the shooting party
deaths by gun wound
are blamed on the victim
failing to identify himself
as impermissible game

otherwise it’s all on
nobs banging away
with their over-and-unders
cloth cap types in gaiters
ejecting and loading

more than enough birds
to swamp the King’s trencher
with hares for afters
scuttling through the furze
ahead of the beaters

someone’s been having it off
with the Duchess again
but no one mentions that
standing shoulder to
tweedy shoulder for the kill




Tony Beyer operates out of Taranaki, NZ. His long poem Sand fire (2019) appears online at Mudlark: https://www.unf.edu/mudlark/chaps/mudlark67/beyer.html.
 
 
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