School for Born Leaders

Enrique Peña Nieto, just one of our many alumni

Day one; we add mania to your stare.

Day two; we teach you how to blow hot air

(For the promotion of din and despair).

Day three; doesn't matter, you won't be there.

SRP

Game not without risk

A maven in vernal Israel

Once ate a migratory quail,

Laid low by the bird,

He studied the word

“Coturnism” to help him prevail.

When the Common Quail performs its Spring migration north through the Holy Land it consumes en route toxic seeds (probably those of a Woundwort – Stachys annua) that are harmless to the bird, but regularly poison those who, shortly afterwards, dine on the migrant.

A keen ladies' man from Israel

Once ate a migratory quail,

Half dead from the bird,

He employed the word

“Coturnism” to impress a female.

People have been aware of this phenomenon (the poisoning) for millennia; the Old Testament blamed God's wrath (Numbers 11: 31-34). The resulting medical condition, coturnism, has its etymological roots in coturnix, Latin for quail.

There was a gourmand from Israel

Who had eaten a cow and a quail

His abdominal grief

Wasn't caused by the beef

But the galliform in his entrail.

I think I've developed limerickism.

The Influence of Desire

The momentary touch that leaves a doubt,

An incitation that may not have been,

It's the paint our reason tries to throw out

That colours our vision of worlds unseen.

SRP

Poulpe Fiction

Simon Warmer

None who was in the Dog and Mollusc that night will forget Cephalo Pod's emotive instrumental. Like all octopuses Pod had three hearts, we saw them, they were worn on a variety of his sleeves as he squeezed from his lap Charles Trenet's haunting ditty;

There wasn't a dry eye in the Dog when Ceph mumbled his farewells. Shouts of “Encore!” echoed in his statocyst as he waved multiple goodbyes and left via a crack in the wainscotting.

In Lipogram Land

Vowl was unusually fraught

So Gadsby said “Both of us ought

To stop this Oulipian fad,

It's driving us thoroughly mad”,

To which Vowl said, “Why d'you think that?

Indigo platypus drowning a cat”.

SRP

Beyond the call of duty

What is “beyond the call of duty”?

I imagine clean air, hard stone and silence,

A climbing path that never ends

And the will to take it.

SRP

The Gold Clock

“Well, George,” announced the young man

“I'd like to take this opportunity to say”

And then he said. And George listened

To talk of duty, thanks, token of recognition

“for twenty-five years' loyal-”

What? Twenty-five? It was forty-four!

Would have been forty-eight if it wasn't for the war.

George looked up, but his tightening throat

Censored protestation.

Someone else intervened,

The young man apologised and explained

How he had got his retirees mixed up

And George saw what had happened,

Saw everything that had ever happened,

And reassured the young man

That it can happen to anyone.

SRP