Football Poets

POETS X1

POETS X1
In goal, I would place Caedmon,
For if any Viking made a raid upon
His goal with a shoal of longboats,
He would repel them with Anglo-Saxon wit
And make them flit.
At full back, Percy Bysshe Shelley could welly
The ball past Castlereagh and well away
From danger too,
And so prevent another Peterloo.
Chaucer will be our enforcer
At centre back,
And many a hack
Will hail
His tale
Of Gillingham.
Shakespeare will fake fear
Alongside him; his grim
Visage will taunt the enemy
With the epitome
Of tragedy;
But ‘tis comedy
Of dissimulation
And confabulation:
All the world’s a stage
And as a player,
Will’s a slayer,
He is indefatigable
In his search for the ball,
And will use his quill
For good or ill
To keep the score,
Win, lose or draw,
For John Keats cheats
With addition,
And e’en perdition
Does not deter him
From his whim
To Fanny Brown around in midfield.
The referee of this jamboree
Is Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Who has a cranial hole which
Confuses his memory.
The laudanum
Plays harum scarum
With his summary
Of the score
And what’s more,
Edmund Spenser
Is even denser
As a referee’s assistant;
He’s never equidistant
From the play,
Instead, he’s away
With the Faeries and Queens,
Although
Arthur Rimbaud
At six
Will play tricks,
Making a rainbow
From A E I U O,
This spectrum-synaethesia
Ends Coleridge’s amnesia
To such a paradoxical degree
That he forgets he’s the referee
And joins in on our side,
Running far and running wide,
Our new number 7
From Xanadu’s immeasureless heaven,
Skinning Kevin Horlock
‘Til disturbed by a visitor from Porlock.
Inside right will have to be John Clare
Who never plays dirty but only plays fair
And whose surreptitious transfer to Fulham
Will keep the asylum
At bay so each day
John can have a rebirth
Just like William Wordsworth,
A lone striker at 9
Leading the line
Far from midfield’s madding crowd
He wanders lonely as a cloud
But every now and again
Just now and just then
He’ll get the gen from Ben
Johnson. Sort of News from 10,
For the first Poet Laureate
On Poesy’s winged chariot
Will weave magic and weft
As our inside left
And when we win our cup ties
He’ll drink to us only with his eyes
“Drink to me only with thine eyes” –
What a curious notion is this,
Drinking your eyes without glasses,
Yet making a spectacle of yourself.
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
Ocular imbibing solely,
Swallowing your pupil and cornea wholly,
Nothing else, no other liquid,
Just your eyes clear and limpid,
With your tear-ducts
Making it a lachrymatory suicidal experience.
Now, would you pull them out one by one,
And force them down with your finger and thumb,
Or serpent-like, twist and lengthen your tongue,
But imagine,
The first one would make you scream in horror and pain,
But that’s only the hors d’oeuvre,
You’ve got to do it again,
Drink to me with thine eyes only?
Let’s face it, that would kill you stone dead,
If you like me that much,
Buy me a Guinness instead,
You’d have to spend money,
That much we’re knowing,
But at least then you be able to see where you’re going,
So, drink to me only with thine eyes?
I don’t wish to be cruel and unkind,
I know that love is supposed to be blind,
But what if this short-sighted amatory act
Left your partner totally untouched, in fact,
By Cupid,
Let’s face it,
You’d look really stupid.
Now, apologies for that digression,
We’ve still to choose number X1,
We need a sage, a prof, a don,
Who else could there be, but our Big Ron,
A TV pundit, now a little fatter,
But who can forget Early Doors and The Little Ratter?
Such words he’s coined and so he’s joined our team,
Big Ron of all the TV crew, you are the Christmas cream,
He’s on the ball,
He’ll hear our call,
So come on Ron, set out your stall,
So come on Ron, set out your stall,
With the bard and you, we’ll confuse them all.

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