I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Lost without eu

 

‘Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’ was Joni Mitchell’s question. And the wonderful British Twitter poet Brian Bilston, echoing perhaps the French novelist Georges Perec, who wrote a novel  (a ‘lipogram’ apparently) that did not use the letter ‘e’, imagines Britain’s sad future outside – and without – the EU.

 

Com  ppance

Things work both ways, of course,
and so the EU left our language,
waited not for any half-mumbled   logy,
bade no adi  .
And the   rosceptics,
Felt no   phoria,
outmano  vred as they were.

Words found themselves misconstrued.
There were bitter f  ds
raised fists, Fr  dian slips,
few remained n  tral.
Unemployment rose
amongst mass  rs, chauff  rs, n  roscientists.
Some mus  ms closed.

The country got roomier,
and rh  mier,
a mausol  m to memories of imperial grand  r,
mixing racial slurs
with a sip from a glass of Pimms
and a snip of secat  rs.

Brian Bilston can be found @brian_bilston on Twitter and you can support his first collection, You Took the Last Bus Home: The Poems of Brian Bilston, at this link.

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