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Table Football at the College of Agriculture by the Sea

1 Leave a comment on verse 1 0 The general synopsis at dusk:
land around the coastal weather station
has been requisitioned for table football.

2 Leave a comment on verse 2 0 A huge tournament by the College of Agriculture’s
inshore waters gathers all the continents’
luminaries: the high-angle masters

3 Leave a comment on verse 3 0 of flat performance, football’s socialist-state directors
turning players suspended in mid-air
to super-powered windmills of irrelevance.

4 Leave a comment on verse 4 0 The tactics and philosophies hardly deviate
from strictures of the well-thumbed
Hodgson’s Guide, ubiquitous on campus.

5 Leave a comment on verse 5 1 Central American and Hungarian pioneers,
despite a steel bar through their players’ stomachs,
still flood the midfield by tilting

6 Leave a comment on verse 6 0 forwards back or defenders forward:
still find unworldly width. The Dutch
would like positions to interchange – always play

7 Leave a comment on verse 7 0 with a screwdriver to swap a notional Rensenbrink
with an armless Johnny Rep. A two-man job
with a welding iron unfixes Kluivert:

8 Leave a comment on verse 8 0 joins him to the shoulder of the last defender
governed by a man from Inverurie Loco Works FC,
sole representative of the Highland League,

9 Leave a comment on verse 9 0 safety goggles deflecting sparks off the orange
while he thinks of Formartine United
or Gala Fairydean, Keith and Lossiemouth,

10 Leave a comment on verse 10 0 the ground underneath and the sky up above
his only support crew here as everyone breaks
for noodles, finds a tactical middle ground,

11 Leave a comment on verse 11 0 compromise or further acrimony
over a full-array imported banquet
in the signed and Sake-infused

12 Leave a comment on verse 12 0 half-understood language of the table.

39

Notes

Snapshot of an imaginary table football tournament by the sea.

Source: http://footballpoets.org/poems/massive-table-football-tournament-at-the-college-of-agriculture-by-the-sea/