Soupy twist

"MR MUSIC — WILL YOU PLAY..."

{Score of Oh My Darling, Clementine}

1. In a kettle made of metal
   Sat a sandwich made of soap;
   Theodora's apple corer
   Sneezed and floorwards fell the Pope.


2. Paris-Cairo, leaky biro,
   Several hundred tons of sluice,
   Through the laughter wandered Arthur,
   Quite unsure of Big Bird's use.


3. Then James Galway fluted all day
   And eventually went splat,
   Up stepped Quarswell with a cow-bell
   (He was stuck with rhymes like that).


4. Enter Boffo (yea, the Poffo!)
   He was quite a boff-poff-toff;
   There stood Pangram talking flimfam,
   "Vest cwm fly zing jabs Kurd Qoph".


5. Oddly, Konrad was his granddad,
   And for Germans, "dung" is "Mist",
   "Dicky ticker!" screamed Earwicker,
   Here's our cocktail — soupy twist.
   

A sinister gentleman's raincoat

"Moo!" said an objective correlative, wandering periphrastically down the road of a new road, having all the usual appurtenances like gravity, full stops and so on (go on), full stop. No main verb, however, like the other one. It was not a new cow, not even a moo-cow. In fact it was an old cow, like most relatives. Fortunately it was also self-contradictory, or at least deluded. Irony followed it — like a sinister gentleman in a '70s raincoat following a spy. Or even a spy in his seventies following a sinister gentleman's raincoat. "That's my raincoat!" said the sinister gentleman, who proved to be Pope Karswell, the famous dead possum and week-end flute-toting superhero.

    Next week: Life. The last soupy twist. (Or — my other ear's a spaceship.)

Where's my moo-cow?

"For a moment there I thought someone was in charge," said Arthur. "But you're just another stereotype like the Jamaicans and those superfluous Bolsheviks." And he helped Hannibal forcibly to some cauliflower cheese, which had not previously existed.

"Get real!" said Hannibal, "you know that isn't a wig!"

They pressed SHIFT+ALT+CTRL+BREAK, had a garlic pizza and escaped from their limbic goatherd. Four hundred and thirty-something revoltingly mauve fried cucumbers dropped expectedly (un) out of an odd-smelling grille in the floor (for there is little gravity in outer time). "Oh my God!" blasphemed the Pope, from his painful staple-bed; "Where's Mr T?" screamed Hannibal, who had just stubbed his cigar on the door and his toe on the... door; "Where's my moo-cow?" asked T.S. Eliot, making a rather more explicit than usual appearance in the polt. Line? Not in this goon! And James Galway laughed and blew them all up.

Boredom in limbo

    Stranded in limbo, clinging to some bits of metatext, surrounded only by the Jamaicans and their poles and little drums, Arthur moaned "There's even less background now, and I don't care, I never had a character anyway — I am just me, both of us." "Da!" agreed the comrades, who kept together better than the popes. "Dada." "That's the problem," — Hannibal looked resigned, "I was supposed to be 'back at base'. It was always too late for you guys, anyway. And where am I?" Earwicker beamed up from the subtext. "The origin is always a trace," he said.

    "What about Mama?" contributed Theodora, who was now bald and wearing dungarees. "It's all very well you avant garde people, who all happen to be men even when you are common nouns, continually abolishing the space-time continuum and/or trying to get on with the action. But I am almost as bored as the romance."

    In somewhere soon did H.C.E.
    Another stereotype decree
    Where Alf and Hannibal began
    To acknowledge that a "real man"
    Cannot hyperventilate without a physical existence subject to the usual problematics of time and space.

Back at the base

Meanwhile, back at the base:

"I love it when a plan comes together," exclaimed Hannibal. "Yo, dudes," replied his side-kicks. "Yes," continued Hannibal, "I've succeeded in opening a new plot line, ignoring what happened previously." In any case, it had become only too clear that none of it was real. The characters were poorly depicted, and there was no plot. So they all dematerialised — all apart from Prof Karswell, who was eaten by a giant snail.

But now we must ready ourselves for deeds of valour, comrades. For Arthur stands in dire need of our help.

Whisperingly

Pangram climbed on a table and whisperingly declaimed:

        "zed ox,
Jehovah, who, in one night, when he passed
From Egypt marching, equalled with one stroke
B"

    "Shakespeare?" asked Quizbang.

    "No, Coriolanus, v. iii. 44-8 (-Z)" said the Mope.

    "Phlegms fyrd wuz qvint jackbox," yelled Pangram, and fell off his chair.

    "Why all the new characters?" bemuddled Galway.

    "Not sure," replied Arthur, "but they help to fill up {arrow to the margin, where sideways is written:} THE MARGIN!

"What margin?" inquired the Jehovah Hercules, who had loved him well. Meanwhile, some of the popes and Carswellii amalgamated. "Done," said the note, "because we are two minis." Not to mention a beige Skoda, unfortunately.

It was all he had left

    "In what way does the preceding paragraph advance the plot?" asked Konrad.

    "Botticelli," said his namesake, causing several tons of goobly webble to drip like icing-sugar from the packet of chaffinch that all-of-a-hyphen alighted from the bus. Standing room bonely! Move down the list...

    "Well, it's just balls, isn't it?" protested the customer.

    "I told you so," said Big Bird.

    "O ono nyou ou dididintnt!" The other popes were less than synchronous, as wasn't Conrad, other than Khartoum. Theodora's feathers were not universes; some had as many as fifty. Four Kharswells spoke as a bust of Longfellow. "Henry, old bean," they soliloquised, "Up upon the overmantle / If there's dust you never-can-tell / Finding out is rather pointless / Not unlike a broken pencil."

    "Why blither...?" murmured Earwicker. Pangram did not reply, having only at his disposal G, K, Z and a second-hand beige Skoda. "You can't use K twice," said Earwicker, realizing. "That's what they said about the Skoda," Pangram retorted. He was fined three H's, four A's, four T's, two S's, an E, a D and an O. Recycling the bits, the weels proved of incalculable diameter. "Ulp!" he said. It was all he had left. "G#" contributed Galway, sitting on the broken violin briefly.

    "Get real..." Konrad suggested lugubriously. But there were too many to be happy blue. Like the pencil, but bring back the pink. Beerbohm Tree at any rate was dead, and Henry Irving joined him.