With Tim on the stage, Irving asks "What's your age?"
and even the hardest hacks soften.
"I'm twelve, sir," Tim says, and, smiling, the Prez
asks "What part of the press?" "I'm from Kids," Timmy says.
Says Irving, "I read your work often!

Alarmed, now the Chief has to cut short his speech.
"Hey, bring that boy up to the podium!"
Tim's embarrassed but proud and thinks out aloud,
"Way cool!" Purvis shouts "Make way!" and the crowd
settles down to a low pandemonium.

Below is a faucet. Now, being a faucet, of course it
is dripping. Tim lands with a "thud!".
All as one, at the sound the press turns around
when the boy hits the ground. "He's not injured," says Brown.
"No blood. Just a whole lot of mud."

One arm round the wisteria, Tim jots down "Bacteria.
Just like in the ads. Bathroom walls."
Says the chief "Now listeria, that's a superior bacteria!
It's in the cafeteria –– " Just then the kid in the wisteria
loses his grip, slips and falls.

"So please don't walk out, can we just talk about
modal bacter, and a bit about worms?"
The hubbub dies down. Some ageing hack with a frown
tries to write it all down: "Today, dressed like a clown,
the Commander in Chief discussed germs."

Too late. Now the crowd is uneasy and loud,
about three notches short of hysteria.
"Dumb as a box of rocks," says a shock jock
and accidentally knocks Timmy right off his box,
so Tim climbs up the nearest wisteria.

Says Timmy "Much better!" Then Irving Lumwedder
spots the boy halfway up the wisteria.
"My friends of the press, do you like my head dress?
I can tell you're impressed. Now, my friends, let me stress,
today we are talking bacteria.

Lumwedder's aware of the buzz in the air
so he cranks up his decibel rate.
"I'd just like to mention ..." But the crowd is in tension.
"May I have your attention, please, Fourth Dimension.
I mean, men and women of the Second Estate!"

A frisson of stress ripples right through the press,
obsessed, more or less, to guess what they hear.
"Scuse me? What's he saying? This address is in mayhem!
It's a mess. Is he playing?" Backstage, wireless John Graham
whispers "Yes, Mister S", and presses his ear.

"See, there's this factor. The dang 'modal bacter'.
I don't wanna bushwhack ya ... but it's gotta be covered.
Hands up if it's new. Hmm ... OK ... quite a few.
Uh-huh. Golly. Whew! This ain't easy to do,
to explain all this stuff I've discovered.

"OK. Modal bacter. Hmmm ... ever seen how a tractor,
when it turns up the soil, how it ... OK. Nuh.
That ain't my meanin'. OK ... you know when it's rainin'
it fills up the drain and – nahh, that ain't explainin'.
But you follow me, don't you? Uh-huh??"

Note to Bloglet subscribers of the fishpond. I have tried and tried but can't see why the posts have not had line breaks between the lines of each verse. It's odd, because line breaks work in the Wilson's Almanac Bloglet subs, and all the settings are identical. If I can find a way to fix this, I will, but it's got me stumped, sorry.

Please excuse this test:

Line break one
Line break two

Paragraph break one

Paragraph break two

"Now, my friends here we go, I want you to know
this ain't no press conference, not exactly.
It's a keynote address, you could say more or less,
and I'll give it my best, men and women of the press,"
says the President matter-of-factly.

The Prez clears his throat. "I'll depart from the notes
of my writers. Can we cope?
Heh heh, just like Lincoln," the President's winking,
"I know what you're thinkin', that Abraham Lincoln
wrote a speech on some old envelope."

The press liked his wit and giggled a bit.
"I couldn't find no letter," grins Irving Lumwedder,
"So I wrote down some stuff, on my sleeve – weren't too tough.
It's a bit 'off the cuff', heh heh, but enough."
The press is amused. Not so Hedda.

I wrote on September 4: "From today, I'll be posting here one verse at a time, so that subscribers can get them by email ..." What I meant to say was that I'll post them as they're written. If I happen to do more than one in a sitting, the emailed Bloglet subscription will reflect that.

I haven't done one since Monday as I've been a bit unwell and quite busy with lifeworld. Hopefully tomorrow. :)

Oh yeah ... I'm trying to work out how to get the Bloglet subs to be true to the line breaks in the poem. No good having them run on like prose ... even I can't read that.

For Timmy Mundine, from 'Kids' magazine'
today his career's culminated.
"Can't get any better," he thinks "there's Lumwedder!
And that looks like Hedda. But where are her feathers?
I spose that she ain't 'nitiated."

New method of posting new verses
My aim is to post new verses of Kill the President here on average at least one per day. Some days I'm unable to post, so I try to keep up the average by doing more when more time's available.

From today, I'll be posting here one verse at a time, so that subscribers can get them by email (see Bloglet subscription form in the left-hand column). The way I was doing it before was to creat a 'Part', then add to it progressively. That method doesn't allow updates to be emailed out – once a post has been emailed, that's it and no updates are recorded. Confused yet?

So the normal blog entry method will now be followed. Most days, subscribers will get a verse sent to them. But I recognise that that causes some difficulties in reading here in the fishpond (like reading standing on your head).

To get around that problem, every few days I will update the page on my website where I have the whole poem written out in the normal order, from top to bottom like any other poem. There's a link to that page in the left-hand column as well, and for those who wish to bookmark it, it's http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/poetry15.html.

Kill the President

Part 8

The media assembling, Lumwedder resembling
Sitting Bull, now a sheer disbelief –
nay, horror – descends on the women and men
of the press, and just then, a hush happens when
he strides in with 'Hail to the Chief'.

The folks of the press all attempt to suppress
gasps and laughter. "Is he a Mohican?"
asks a man from AP. "Chickasaw, looks to me"
says Ms NBC. "Shhh!!!" says an agent. "It's Cree."
Says Irving, "Mah fellow Americans ..."

To be continued