Q

 

[Q]

 

Quixote, pronounce the name how you will,

Ventures boy-like to land on the moon of his want

His rocket science antique, his book in Delusion font

His sidekick eyerolling at the nothing gained, nil.

Q will do for you next his famous rescue mission

Whisk his only sweetheart from what she’s been doing

Who does quite nicely and doesn’t need rescuing

And is all in his head, Herself and her damsel position.

 

He joins the Q of all the Q’s on celebrity calendars

Face fierce, hand grand, shoulder bolder, foot fit

A lunchbox legend in his own present tenses

His quill a keyboard, his helmet a colander ….

How long till he falls from his horse in a porridge of bullshit

His backstory moondust, as he comes to his senses?

Q

Grand Prix time again the quick and the dead.

The Coronavirus Team what more need be said.

Their mystery entrant, too late, see red.

All sound and fury for the overfed.

The chequered cloth black phlegm white sediment

Falls across both bad and good, savings spent.

Noise and spiral turns to an upset event

As the viral burn asks where it all went.

Quite quite quiet is (quoth) quaint quarantine.

Quatorze we fast forwards to: quelling scenes

Of quoits (forsooth), quaffing, books about queens.

No, cannot quibble with a long Long Weekend.

Do our own Decameron and spend

Unquestioned quiescent quietude. End.

Q (May)

Horace Rumpole was sustained by a good case, Pomeroy’s plonk, and Q. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Q yachted from Fowey. He was a model Water Rat, inventing ditties mucking about in boats. High in the blue above swifts whirl and call- WE are down a-dabbling, Up tails all! He’s housed yet in the royal blue of the Oxford set. After composing something “exceptionally fine”, he advised, delete before submission: “murder your darlings.” Even his name is redolent of ancient mythic glories, active feathery writing, and reading relaxation: Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Q (February)

Q is for Quaint, where “lies always now the notion of a certain curiosity and oddness, however these may be subordinated to ends of beauty and grace.” As, for example, the bustle, a pre-modern teapot, or the ‘ancient’ ramparts supporting the railway bridge over Burgundy Street, Heidelberg. Q itself is quaint, in its own way, whereas the word “had once simply the meaning of elegant, graceful, skilful, subtle.” Like the shift, a post-modern teapot, the upgraded Heidelberg bridge, Burgundy Street. R is for Richard Chenevix Trench (February reading) the quaint-not-quaint archiepiscopal philologist who noted this distinction in his ‘Select Glossary’(1859).

Q (September)

Q revolves around a star out there, the closest planet to sustain life, likes ours. We, who have trouble showing interest in our neighbours and ignore the destruction of life in our own world, become quite fascinated by the possibilities of an inaccessible Question. That life may consist of forms outside our range of reference, existence inconsistent with anything imaginable, quiddities that defy our quizzical science, only prompts grander quests with our outsized eye-glasses and quaint sound-bowls. Gold may be quartz, September a blink, on the Qs out there, moving in ways not yet explained or observed, eppur si muove.