COMPETITION

)—_Y` A fricr',

Class hatred

Jaspistos

IN COMPETITION NO. 2131 you were given the first two lines of a free-verse poem by D.H. Lawrence and invited to add 14 lines to them in the same spirit.

By which I meant you to understand 'and in free verse'. Since the great majority of you followed my drift, I stick with my inter- pretation of the terms. 'I used to love DHL's poem when I was a teenager, but that was a long time ago,' writes Gerard Benson. So did I, in the days when, unjusti- fiably, I considered myself intensely unbourgeois, though I remember being rather irritated by the poem's slighting ref- erence to golf as an occupation unsuitable for a grown man.

Commendations to 0. Smith and Chris Tingley. The prizewinners, printed below, receive £25 apiece, and the bonus bottle of the Macallan Single Malt Highland Scotch whisky is the property of Ralph Rochester.

How beastly the bourgeois is,

Especially the male of the species, Though haven't we all known the occasional bourgeoise Who was a right little Tartar?

But these days it's not easy To find a bourgeois When you need one Pour epater, or even to shy a half-brick at.

Like only the other night, Slashing the tyres of an S reg., Epsom-green Range Rover, the way one does, I hear down the pub just whose pride's been punctured.

It's some weeping, horny-handed Albert, innit, Who clamps cars for a crust.

So, okay, he's no bourgeois neither.

Still, I'm glad I did it, though.

(Ralph Rochester) How beastly the bourgeois is, especially the male of the species.

Turn on the television — doesn't he turn you on?

How slick he is! What a great tan! Such a flashing smile! Isn't it true that clothes maketh the man? Isn't he the ideal presenter, exposing frauds, libertines and shysters on his current affairs show?

Wouldn't you like to earn his salary and be a popular celebrity?

Oh! under the pancake veneer See how he squirms; the worm wriggles when rivals run an exposé on him, relating the pittance he pays his au pair, revealing the liberties he takes with her. Hear him protest about intrusion when he is in the hot seat.

Take away the scripted words when he is interviewed and watch him flounder. How he invokes his rights as a citizen to a privacy he denies all others. (Mark Stankiewicz)

How beastly the bourgeois is, Especially the male of the species. Like the poor he's always with us — But on top and knows how to stay there. Conservative, Labour, even KGB, No matter what,

Your bourgeois, like the chameleon, Will change colour and up he'll pop. He was always there under the skin.

Pol Pot tried to bury the bourgeois.

You can be sure, Had he succeeded, the little Pol Pots Would be bourgeois.

Because bourgeois is being on top, Even perpetual revolution won't do it.

Ask Mao. (T. Griffiths) How beastly the bourgeois is, especially the male of the species — beastly, you understand, not in the vulgar sense of prudery-rudery but much worse.

I mean the sort of thing Emma Bovary was up against — small-town nobodies pretending to be some- bodies, beastly-priestly pontificators on the Art of Living and Living up to the Crawford-Featherblankets, who will never be beastly in a petit-bourgeois way, only on a really heroic scale, they and all the little Beastlinesses, bourgeois to their lack of backbones. (Roger Till) How beastly the bourgeois is, especially the male of the species, with his credit-card holder in leather and his archive of Sondheim and Satie and the password he uses at work so wittily stored on his laptop.

He stands in his shower, whistling an aria, choosing an odour discreetly from a line of importunate lotions, like a bishop inspecting a pauper, dabbing and dabbing, as if he were blessing an urchin.

Watch him pronouncing Italian pastas as if his tongue were from Florence, and sucking the thin, thin strings through the smirk on his pale pink lips, like young slugs, to impress the long mirror beyond him.

(Bill Greenwell)