Circus

Big bear rides her tiny yellow and red bicycle
as much as her overgrown couplets to an ode
from the neck of a green carapace, gleaming bonce!
So much cool,
for a bear.
Give her her due, she's light on her feet,
toys with the crowds boyish emotions quite elegantly.
I almost feel like putting tuppence in her pot -
she looks at you appealingly, with relentless
chutzpah and denial -
but for her hastily scribbled scrap of doggerel
and you know the Elephant choreographs her routines.
That time she begged to win, I mean, a bear begging
for her supper, never to go back on the buses again.

The Elephant moves ponderously into the ring
his slow, dim eyes, his trumpet - what hearts
he hasn't won and his vet's on standby just in case,
our heart-strings are wrenched as he kneels ever so slowly -
stitches from his op just healing -
sobbing violas of sestinas and chunky-knit iambics.
He milks it endlessly, unembarrassed, oozingly
squeezed against time-limits.
Maximum Bob,
we love you!
The world needs more of your
sensibility and alexandrine heroics
papering over cracks with jaunty maritime airs!
We must clap you 'til the fat lady sings!

The poodle dances daintily into the arena
leaps like relationships, too old by 10 years,
wet nuzzle gleaming love-ly
a frizz like a syntax error
and his spelling mistakes the cheaper end
of a rhyming dictionary. Oh look! see how he scales
the wire 10 inches above his spleen -
vertigo is so much thought,
wrinkling his nose and thinking that lurve
would avoid bare ground where cities had stood.
His eyes twinkle at the neo-georgic arch-ways
of his little doggy verses -
so pleased to meet you, to meet you would deliver
morals per poem, sighs per verse, punctuated randomly
for steps per second over the yellow-brick road.