Philip Birkhead challenges Douglas Munday to a poetry duel.

Twiddle my thumbs

Scratch my bum

Pick my nose

Pull the dry skin

Off my thumb

Pull the hairs

Out of my moles

Pull the hairs

Out of my nose

Squeeze a spot or two

On the back of my trousers

Polish my shoes

Pick my nails

All discretely done

Then, says the nurse

The doctor's waiting

You're the next one

I penned an ocean

Merely to sink into the deep

When water was bitter

And blisters on my feet

I walked for years

To pause but for seconds

They dried up my tears

But provided valuable lessons

The fire burnt my hands

The hands that had commited no crime

Except to witness horror

And be imprissoned by time

My twist and turn

My ache and burn

My exhaustion beyond the fire

My funeral pyre

Then I wrote an eternal note

And placed an SOS

To put God in eternal shoes

And seas to the test

Whilst I faught

I sung the blues

And collected what I bought

And the pain in my brain

The dull thud of no thought

As grit became a byword

And excrutiating pride in the fight

Then I discovered madness

Be beyond all things;

Beyond red hot fires

And cold baths,

But flowers,

They hurt

So tired was my heart,

And I still wasn't immune

To the bite of sharks.

As a line of infinite pain

Stretched before me

I died willingly

With tears on my face

And hair blowing in the breeze

I bowed out of the rat-race

Oh, the yeilding of mighty pen

Be the undoing and doings of men

Indeed such doings I cannot describe

Be they the doings of a scribe

And then they laugh and don't understand

The subtleties of the finer hand

And too deep,

A little distressed

Why a woman should love a woman

Or a man don a dress

Too wide

I cannot describe

The breadth of all human breath

And life

Indeed death

All spied upon

And detective deft

They turn away

They don't want ot know

Why should it rain love?

And flowers grow in the snow?

They don't want to think

Or understand

What makes us powerful

God or man

And finaly

Of what to observe

Of what is left

The colours of love and hatred

And the meaning of death