‘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.
