kidattypewriter

Monday, June 11, 2012

The blightings on the wall

Something struck me yesterday when I was in the toilet at the pub. Thankfully it was a thought, because it does not bear thinking about what sort of thing would strike you in the toilet at the pub if the thing that strikes you is not a thought. Anyway, I was thinking about the occasional 'because it's good for you' government-sponsored health advertisement you see in bars and pubs around the city. (Because if you can read it in proximity to the occasional dirty limericks you get on dunny walls at pubs, then you've really got to believe it.)

So, I thought, why doesn't the Health Department at the government get into the business of writing dirty limericks, toilet wall poems, and the like? Clearly-printed, neat, bureaucratically-produced saucy limericks about sexually-transmissible diseases, that sort of thing?

There'd be the standard warnings about the importance of contraception:

If you have unprotected sex, you'll probably get rabies,
Or any number of other diseases, such as lower-class babies.

If it's by the government, it wouldn't be the same without anti-smoking propaganda:

Regret regret
The cigarette
The cigarette
 Regret regret

The cigarette
Upset upset
Upset upset
The cigarette

Dead yet dead yet
The cigarette
The cigarette
Dead yet dead yet.

These days, funnily enough, you only seem to hear about legal drugs being bad for you, but the risky behaviour of illegal drug users would get the occasional look in:

Little needle -
Small disease -
Huge burden on the public health system -
Taxes please.

And of course I suppose you'd occasionally have to put up with a spot of nakedly self-interested political barracking. There's poetry for that, too:

Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard
You'll be full of vim and vigour
Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard
And the parts that you want will get smaller and the parts that you want will get bigger
Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard
You'll eat better every day
Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard
Everything you worry about will just wash away
Vote for Gillard vote for Gillard
Your life will be a ballad sung by Anthony Calleja
Don't vote Abbott don't vote Abbott
You'll get gonorrhea. 

Hey, everyone, I think this thing's a goer. Excuse me while I get the Health Department on the line and work up my application to be the first publicly-sponsored Sycophant Poet Laureate....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am a world renowned toilet poet-been doin stuff in loos of a poetic kind since I could stone a crow and luv a duck, wondering what the Melbourne toilet poetry scene is like, and whether I'd get much of a quid over there. Sick of London with all this Jubilee jazz and Olympic funk...any chance you could gif me a link to other toilet poets in Melbourne?

cheers guv,

Spencer Shanksworth - aka 'Skugs'

TimT said...

Mr Skugs! We have heard of your toilet fantasias over here in Melbourne and I feel certain there is a public convenience here for your, ahem, convenience.

I look forward to hearing more about this literary incontinence... I mean, this literary intercontinental venture shortly!

I have often thought about holding poetry readings in several of Melbourne's larger and more famous dunnies; I've no idea why it hasn't already been done....

TimT said...

And of course literature is all about self-excreme... exclama... that is, self-expression. That, at least, is 'alimentary, dear Watson' as the criminologically-minded detective opined to his proctologically-minded friend.

Anonymous said...

lol

Email: timhtrain - at - yahoo.com.au

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