(with apologies to Shakespeare’s Falstaff)

Away with damp night, Dawn,

Within who’s damned slothful hours

I slobber and hauk.

Cursed, too, the dumb two-seater settee

Wherein, un-welcomed, oversized,

I curl in analgesic numbness

To furnish heedfully

Unto King-sized and its slumbersome occupant

Deserved relief from symptomatic manifestations

Of the rudimental kind

By which I am beset.

And hanged be the Hippocratical devotees and alchemists

Who collect their geld

And offer

Naught but ineffectual succour

Arise, arm and sally forth kind antibods

And may thee fulsomely cause to flinch and scatter

And pinch out and so, excising,

Remove th’ engorging, rheumy-causing,

Slime-generating

Invisibility.

And may ‘fluenza by day’s bright resurrecting light

Be carried forth by wayward zephyrs

To afflict another of low fortune with

Indecent haste

That I may gleeful sleep away, betimes,

The weary aftermath of pestilence and,

Un-congested,

Freely breathe again highway’s sweet vapours.

Except, until salvation,

O Wandering Death,

Divert thy wanderings hither and

With gentle touch, relieving –

Thus touching, wander on.

– W Gayler, Sling.