I shouted at the TV last week, beyond the stilled fields
recently ploughed of their prize, where now we wait
and watch for new seeds where hope was replanted.
I stopped to moo last week as you bellowed back at us
from the not-so-stilled screen in our isolated living room-

you’d be going to the pub;

One must support the landlords, you said, not everyone, of course
but some of us must do our bit, you said, on This Morning,
with Phil and Holly and Vanessa, now back on Virgin.

I roared like a farmer, last week, who’d lost control
of an old Bull, still so convinced of his shiny cock
and bull tales the Union had regaled since 1845.

We recall what failed us once with every filled plate
that passes our table now, while you bury yourself
in the Best of Bull, keeping up with the Hancocks’-

down the pub with balls forward and brain resting
derriere where you happily placed the Irish, once,
when we were nothing but dying boats running west

from cold hands in the east.

I shouted at the tv last week and yesterday, I asked;
Did you take your son to the pub too, that night after the sofa,
after the stinking bull broke free from the paddock,
all horny but headless; hiding all the fear, all the silage,

in the face of the ripe old rot of the best of British.

Yesterday, they announced the Young Bull at No.10
was poorly. How’s the beer taste now, Old Bull?

PS, the PM ain’t no monument to immortality.

 

All Words and Photographs by Damien B. Donnelly