Crust

 

Crust

 

Sir, your pie has no filling.

Oh, it has a crust –

a little indigestible, to be sure,

not enough butter, too much flour

with saccharine enough to choke,

ah, you did not rub

and there’s the joke.

 

Sir, there is no filling in your pie,

just a heap of ingredients

piled high,

culled from an old, old book:

Fanny Craddock’s Victorian Pantry,

Beatrice Mould’s Garden Panties –

they sit beside your lumpen suet,

you thumbed the pages,

shook the cruets,

stirred in vain, but could not do it

and pebble dashed the porcelain

with whatever’s in there

that passed for brain.

 

Sir, that pie lacks for filling -

a homity pie, a pasty pie,

but you’d hardly call it a humble pie,

beneath your crust

there’s only sky;

echoes of something hollow,

a knuckle bread without the yeast,

an empty church that wants for priest,

a disused chimney,

a frigid flue,

a Copycats version of Who Do You Do,

an impersonation of a cliché -

Oh, Betty, you are awful,

without the laughter

or the pratfall,

Oh, Vera, I don’t really know,

too prosaic for a piece of prose

dressed in other people’s clothes –

when it’s cooked,

you hold your nose,

it’s stinking out the kitchen.

 

Oh, sir your pie is only vacuoles,

eat it and effluence flows

downriver upon a common stream,

to a confluence

of empty theme,

which only the mediocre laud,

and any sort of criticism is poured

into tone deaf, cloth ears

excuse me, for I will not hear,

and even when it’s hard to swallow

they’ll lap it up

and surely follow.