Anything Goes

She was a seasonal beast who slept through the summer;
I checked pockets and sleeves to flesh out a drama
and discovered that she hadn’t any clothes.

As each winter yawned she stretched and then started
to rewrite A History of The Antarctic
in twenty-seven different types of snows.

On our French rendezvous she performed ingénue
insisting that Seamus can rhyme with Camus
and poetry be chiselled out of prose.

Her favourite vice, her pastime of choice
was to gaze on the ocean while reading James Joyce
in the passage where she found all water froze.

At her wheel in the attic, she spun Mathematics,
adding bad habits to poor demographics,
divided by the square of Average Joes.

In The Oedipal Complex she danced with each sex –
an arm in a sling and a ball on her legs
to the rhythm of a million status quos.

Of an evening she supped with Beelzebub,
then threw it all up, that ain’t healthy but
it’s the going rate for alternate egos.

She wore a wide-brimmed hat with a paisley cravat,
she craved a moustache but couldn’t grow that:
she never saw what lay beneath her nose.

Her ultimate script was a tale with a twist
of a woman worshipped, a famed novelist
who disappeared somewhere nobody knows.

I’ve trawled each search engine you might find a friend in,
there’s no happy ending for me and that penguin;
this isn’t the denouement I’d have chose

but anything goes.