LPiA Nov22

[busker]

‘Twas ten days short
of the Ides of March
in 1953.
God was in his heaven -
a tea shop in Devon -
(where vacationing, Ms Parche
said “I’ll no longer abort
like a non Aryan punter
but name my next child Gunter)
the unsmiling Smiley,
nicknamed “the Great Red Hunter”.

As he stirred Darjeeling’s finest,
musing on the commie spy nest
they’d recently uncovered -
damn that Kim Philby -
his mind moved to other
matters, such as the Tsarist dynast -
fierce, like the Franks
they’d recruited to their ranks.
A plot he’d hatched to smother,
like a stealthy alligator
the last living great dictator
was in motion on the continent.

In Moscow, old Lavrentiy
sat on a giant pillow
like an unsexy Sarah Palin
atop the face of Stalin
and listed his dacha on Zillow
(for this was happening, reader,
in a parallel universe.)

At ten o’clock the doctor
declared that the sight had shocked her -
seeing Lavrentiy Beria
first flayed, then boiled alive
then dunked in a bowl of Chili
for Joseph Dugashvilli
to savour, with sprinkled chives.

For this was a parallel universe -
not better nor worse -
just a different place,
where Anne Franke’s fifty five.