Poetry Inspired by Toast

Some thoughts on SPAM

Nothing quite prepares you
For your first taste of SPAM

From a coffin pot can
A plump quivering mass

Of old porkpie jelly
Looks up from the sandwich

Naked and smiling through
A grim half inch of pink

Flaccid processed meat
Without its coat on:

Nothing quite prepares you
For your first taste of SPAM

Epilogue:

And after a childhood of oppressive
Packed lunches
And those God awful Salads
even wasps wouldn’t touch

I thought I’d seen the last of you
But SPAM, it seems
Had other plans for me
And has embraced the technological age

PCW 2005

Easter Cake

It is Easter and mum is busy with the Easter cake; her badly
Made bed cake, although we all know the only difference
Will be the colour of the icing sugar, since by virtue of some
Ancient veiled secret passed down from mother to
Daughter, through the long lines of history, Easter
Cake must be yellow in our house, while Christmas
Remains white and shiny and birthdays always seem

A veritable free-for-all, and after lectures
About Christ’s great sacrifice and how the meaning
Has been lost, she’ll let me choose the decorations
Retrieving them like old friends from the margarine
Containers that she cleans and keeps for such purposes
As batteries, jam making equipment and the
Stuff she uses to clean out the goldfish bowl

Eagerly I rummage through the sacred assortment
Of toys not to be played with, like the little yellow
Chick with the wire feet; the fat Santa and plastic
Holly leaves, all of which get buried up to their
Knees in the soft sugary expanse of icing
Looking like some kind of surreal battle field
Where soon enough the fallen will gather in the

Dish, figurine plucked from their slice, so gallantly
Defended, which when cut reveals the inner
Layers of the mantle like the jam line Jurassic
Or heavenly butterscotch crust that tastes like love
It is Easter and mum is making the Easter
Cake, and although we all know it will dry out long
Before its time and is destined to become food

For birds, cast out on the lawn for those that scavenge,
It’s hard to think of an Easter without these strange
Little rituals of hers, as if the Last Supper
Saw Jesus offering lemon drizzle cake around
To the disciples, each jostling the other with
Plate in hand, while gentle, motherly Jesus proclaims

“Please don’t get any on the carpet”

PCW 2005

Jacobs

A British obsession

Cheese
on
biscuits

Every Christmas the milkman
Would deliver the Jacobs crackers
(Knackers)
Along with the pop
Each the size of a beer mat
And about as flavorsome

Lest we forget the farm house cheddar
‘None of that foreign muck’
As my father used to say
while he and my Mother perused
Our Christmas shopping list
Which hung menacingly

Like a giant flypaper
Behind the larder door
These days the delicatessen stretches
The length of our local shop
With foreign names I still struggle to pronounce
Lost are the days of strange treats

Now available all year round
But you only ever used to see at Christmas
And which you’d forget in the months
In between until you saw the first tangerines
And boxes of figs with their exotic cardboard lids
Dominating the nut bowl

PCW 2005