Here’s cause to complain,
I was robbed on a train
near Salisbury Plain!
After flushing the chain
I returned to my table
where an Auntie Mabel
in moth-eaten lace
with heart-monitor face
was parked in my place,
and my paperback, floppy,
library-lent copy
of poems (some soppy)
by Cowper, had vanished!
I’d only been banished
by a moment’s relieving.
My mind was heaving
with stumped disbelieving,
for who would go thieving
ballads and sonnets
as though they were wallets
from a man in a shirt
with the Sex Pistols on it?
I tried to exert
some logic in spurts
as I scratched my mohican:
Who’d have the cheek and
desire to abduct
the wordsmithery struck
by obscure old Will-
iam Cowper’s quill?
The train guard took
a cursory look
in her bag, but she might,
the conniving crook,
with no huge dexterous fight,
have ensconced my poor book
in some out-of-bounds nook,
some wizened old cranny.
I concluded with canny
reflection, this granny
who pinches rhymes
from bygone times,
this most heinous of crimes,
I was definite,
was really T.S. Eliot
disguised as an old bat
in a frilly hat.
