An Abstraction
Were a tawdry cat, (I mention in abstraction),
To escape its home for satisfaction,
And come across a mean old gang,
Bankers and Lawyers, that kind of gang,
(Well I did say it was an abstraction),
But back to the banking, judicial faction:
If our tawdry cat were to mow them down,
They’d take that cat to a river to drown,
Who would take it? That I don’t know,
But it would be taken, and they would all go,
Which is funny – isn’t it? You see cats don’t know bankers or anything of that sort,
They might have heard us mention them after Madoff had been caught,
But if, (and this is all speculation),
This cat and another, perhaps a relation,
Came across a troupe of poor,
And beat them silly, beat them sore,
The front page of our Daily Mail,
(No, even in abstraction the paper wouldn’t halt or hail (but to Hitler or an Oxford Fire-sale)
They would say – isn’t it awfully ironic?
We always thought that for those poor there was no tonic,
And they’d call that cat Winston and stuff its mouth with a stove pipe,
And the cat would call meetings, but not for the ‘Dark or Chinky type’
They’d catch the cat out drinking, already mostly pissed,
And they’d report that it was affable, a cat you’d gladly kiss
And he’d probably be elected, that moggy on the spin,
He’d be voted in, in Burnley, and he’d screw them from within,
‘He’s got our best interests at heart’, the electorate would happily announce,
And they’d fake a smile while the checks he wrote, one by one would each one bounce,
And after Burnley had gone up in flames,
(The Abstraction emphasises the randomness of names),
The charred embers of the voters would say,
‘I hope he’s Prime-Minister of GREAT Britain some day’
Paul Horsley
Field Notes 