Member Poem

There is a white ceramic duck in the garden
whose once-yellow beak
and black-feathered wings
have long since been weathered
and scrubbed white
by the elements.
 
Through the window today
I see the hedgehog made of wood
positioned cleverly, I must admit
with its snout against the duck’s backside
as if sniffing like a dog
at the mallard’s downy scent.
 
It must have been pranksters
returning from the pub
giggling and drunken
no doubt
as they choreographed the scene.
 
Or the neighbourhood kids perhaps
bidding faintly at rebellion
on unending summer days
by stealth rearrangement
of the contents of my garden.
 
I can almost feel the speck of joy
they must have undergone
turning the lawn into an orgy
of miniature participants:
the leprechaun near the pond
engaged in coitus with a Buddha
 
 
 
and the metallic owl de-throned
from its perch in the hibiscus
looking vigilant as always
as it sodomises the Portugese pig
whose curly tail
snapped off long ago.
 
It must have been these pranksters
who defiled in such a wondrous way
the cluttered trinkets of my garden––
Though looking at it now,
enjoying the offence
it will probably cause the neighbours
 
when I fail to rearrange it all,
I would rather hold the notion
that while I sleep away each night
my garden comes to life;
its players playing their lifeless games
of nocturnal copulation
before fleeing with the rising sun
 
to the positions where I left them.
But maybe, who knows, in last night’s revelry
the tchotchkes failed to notice
the passing of the time and light
and with the dawn were frozen, snared
 
like a party-throwing teenager
mistiming the return of parents
back from holidays
who find their home sacked
strewn with ash and beer and bodies…
 
But before that, outside
as they step haggard from their taxi
it hits them like a joint-hallucination
the orgiastic tableau
the disgusting beauty of it––
the garden ornaments, all fucking each other.