Author: Doug Jacquier

Perce P Cassidy and the Sunblock Kid

/ Doug Jacquier / 5 Comments

This was written for the Terrible Poetry prompt of the topic of anniversaries, especially diamond ones.

60 years they been ridin’ together

only these days they ride by rail,

Perce’s face like Nebuchadnezzar,

The Kid a whiter shade of pale.

 

Despite all that Hollywood drivel

These two are indefatigable

Although The Kid has developed a dribble

And Perce has a ring that’s inflatable.

 

Just when The Kid thought he’d forgotten

Perce flourished a diamond ring

It’s origins of course misbegotten

But The Kid always loved the bling.

 

Now don’t go round town flashin’

that ring, old Perce he roughly croaks

Folks might get the wrong idea, Kid,

That we’re not pure manly blokes.

 

The Kid smiled and said he’d ne’er tell

And closer to Perce he did scootch

And whispered into his ear-like shell

‘Oh, Perce, you were always so Butch.’

A fishy lens

/ Doug Jacquier / 22 Comments

Barn

Photo: Dawn Miller

This is my 100 word response to this week’s Friday Fictioneers picture prompt.

 

Why aren’t you just happy to swim in the pond like all of us other fish?

What’s the point of having an inbuilt fish-eye lens if you’re not going to take pictures?

Inbuilt fish, gefilte fish. A load of codswallop.

Do I criticise your fish-net stocking sewing circle?

Anyway, why always that damn barn?

That’s where they keep their fishing rods and I don’t want them sneaking up on us.

Idiot, the new owners are vegans.

How do you know?

See any cows or sheep in that field?

I guess not.

Stick to selfies and posting on Fishbook.

 

Little Willie poems

/ Doug Jacquier / 9 Comments

These arise from the very excellent Terrible Poetry site’s challenge for this week to write a Little Willie poem. The name comes from a way of writing poetry that was popular in the early 1900s, where each exponent tried to invent a catastrophe more gory in event and more nonchalant in effect than its predecessor. The favorite ‘hero’ was Willie, and although other characters sometimes crept into the quatrains, the terse lines became known as ‘Little Willies.’” The usual length is a quatrain although some were written as limericks or a double quatrain; but most were short, clever, and darkly humorous. Rhyming is imperative and these poems usually follow an A/A/B/B pattern. As the excellent Ms Owens has demanded, “this week’s poems are to be terrible because of their message. I expect darker tones, questionable humor, and stretches into creative venues writers never knew they had. If you’re sensitive, stay away. If you’re twisted, come on in.”

A Hair-raising Story

Cried an actor ‘My hair is demented”

So off to the barber he went-ed

The poor little sod

chose evil Mr. Todd

Thus were Lovett’s ham burgers invented.

An Axe To Grind

Lizzie lived with her step-mum and dad

An arrangement she could not accustom

So one day, when feeling so very sad,

She took an axe and she de-gutsed ‘em.

Mrs. Bobbit’s Revenge

Their wedded bliss was well-famed

But Little Willie’s oats were untamed

So like any good wife

She took out a knife

And now Little Willie is very well-named.

Blown sideways

/ Doug Jacquier / 15 Comments

Written for Friday Fictioneers 100 word photo prompt.

We didn’t care that the rain came in sideways, driven by the same scouring winds that had delivered the dust from farms hundreds of miles away for so many summers now and sent our own on a similar journey. As long as there was enough to drown our despair at fly-blown carcasses in the paddocks, 100 year old trees falling like majestic matchsticks and harvesters rusting in sagging sheds because now real seeds only produced phantom crops. We hoped it triggered flash flooding and washed out the roads and cut off the power; that was pain we could gladly endure.

Vivacious veracity

/ Doug Jacquier / 12 Comments

This piece was written for the monthly Blog Battle challenge around the word ‘vivacious’. These pieces are normally meant to be around 1,000 words but any one of the following anecdotes provide a picture.

Mrs. Chasen: [after spotting her son, Harold, hanging from a noose in the living room] ‘I suppose you think that’s very funny, Harold. Dinner is at 8:00, Harold. And do try to be a little more vivacious.’ From the movie masterpiece, ‘Harold and Maude’ (1971)

It is said, by some, that a man cannot be vivacious. It is also said, by some, that the world is flat. Both opinions lack veracity but the internet allows them to be propagated widely, along with the inconvenient truth of George Washington having been an alien and Donald Trump being a genius businessman.

For the more perspicacious of you, I offer the following anecdotes from my extraordinary life that put the lie to the canard that men lack vivacity.

As many of you know, when I single-handedly won the war with Antarctica (quibblers may suggest that’s because I was the only one who turned up), I donned my dinner suit and danced with the penguins well into the night. I told this story at a dinner party at George Miller’s house one night and my case for plagiarism against him and the producers of Happy Feet will soon launch.

When President Obama invited me to the White House to thank me for my unsung role in designing ObamaCare, based on my unsung role in developing MediCare in Australia (scribblers and quibblers be damned; Barack and I know the truth), I enthralled his other guests with my playing of the Star Spangled Banner, firstly on a gumleaf and secondly on a musical saw.

Ever alert to pending disasters, when the truck carrying all the costumes for ‘Cats’ was destroyed in our recent unpleasantness called the bushfires, I handed over the hose to one of my fellow volunteers (no, no, please, there were many of us) and leapt into action, like a feral cat leaping onto a native bird (but I digress). I gathered together a team of skilled stitchers and we had a gay old time refurbishing the musical’s costumes within hours and I then returned to my duties at the Gates of Hell.

I was an old friend of Fred Astaire’s (he used to sit in playing the drums when Charlie Watts was ill in a mildly successful band I lead using the pseudonym Mick Jagger) and so I was invited to deliver the eulogy at Fred’s funeral. Not only was there not a dry eye in the house, when I bounded onto the coffin and tap-danced to ‘Top Hat, White Tie and Tails’, Ginger jumped up to join me (modesty forbids me recounting who the critics thought was the more vivacious) and soon the whole wake had a fascinating rhythm.

And then of course there’s my writing, including my uncredited role as script advisor for Forrest Gump, Moulin Rouge and Saving Private Ryan (the stories I could tell about Spielberg, including what really went on in those landing craft between takes, will have to wait for another day.)

These days, I moonlight as creative advisor to a host of entertainers who live in dread of losing their vivacity. Confidentiality agreements prevent me from naming names, except for the divine and unpretentious Lady Gaga. (Oh dear, you didn’t really think she came up with that meat dress idea all by herself, did you?)

Finally, I rest my case on the fact that I’m still here when so many of my less vivacious contemporaries have gone to meet their Maker. Unlike Harold, I don’t have time to hang around. Besides, I’ve just had a call from Bill Gates for my help with solving the corona virus crisis (he was impressed with my work on eliminating the last outposts of foot-in-mouth disease). Bless his cotton socks but even he would hesitate to suggest that vivacity is in his blood, whereas my DNA just reeks of it, so I’m the man (and I emphasise man in this context) for the job.

 

Dear Miss Flanagan

/ Doug Jacquier / 6 Comments

This was written for this week’s Terrible Poetry Contest prompt. “I’d like every one of you to remember your First Love. What did he or she look like, smell like, eat his/her boogers like? MOST IMPORTANTLY: if you were to write that person a poem, in exactly the advanced writing abilities you had at the time, what would that poem look like? I want the younger version of you to read over your composition, sigh in romantic ecstasy, and imagine the love of your life rewarding your efforts with that elusive First Kiss.”

 

I love your sunburnt brown pretty freckles

And your shiny beautiful cute red hair

And your green eyes (sorry if their there not green)

You look just like that film star (can’t remember her name but she’s really pretty, like Doris Day but not her)

I know you catch me staring

And I can’t help going red

Please don’t marry drippy Mr. Smith

Wait for me to catch up.

 

Sined

You Know Who

 

PS – There really was a Miss Flanagan upon whom I had the biggest crush imaginable and, yes, she was always catching me staring and she really did marry drippy Mr. Smith and broke my heart. Of course I would never have delivered this fawning missive but I would have re-read and ‘edited’ it a lot and hoped she wouldn’t find it in the back of my exercise book.

Flight-hearted

/ Doug Jacquier / 10 Comments

This piece was written for the weekly Carrot Ranch 99 word challenge, ‘a dog in the daisies’.

I lived with two dogs. One ephemeral and formless and one tangible and clueless. The first was black and the second a Border Collie, called Flight. The first came and went with no apparent rhyme and the second was a constant. The first would try to bury itself in my brain and the second, in thunderstorms, would try to bury herself in my pockets. The first would corral my nightmares, while the second would attempt to herd the parrots that fed in the daisy-dotted grass. In those moments, the black dog would disappear and my heart would take Flight.

Nightie night

/ Doug Jacquier / 17 Comments

Friday Fictioneers provides a prompt for each week’s challenge to write a 100-word story inspired by a photo. PS – ‘Nightie’ is Australian slang for a nightgown.

Come to a Nightie Night, she said. Everyone dresses in a plain, virginal nightie and are led by ‘nuns’ to a bargain-price shopping spree at the local lingerie boutique. There’s even an ‘Ascension to Heaven’ ceremony’, she said. It’ll be a hoot, she said. And when I glanced through the window to the next escalator, I could see the idea had really caught on. But when we got there it was like a cotton-infested hurricane as the ‘angels’ fought for the best bargains. I’ll take my chances with what happens when I take my nightie off, I said, and de-escalated.

 

Be still my swell-ed heart

/ Doug Jacquier / 7 Comments

This piece was written for this week’s Terrible Poetry challenge, a love sonnet, and was joint winner.

 

Be still, my swell-ed heart, by Shake’s peer (aka Doug Jacquier)

I did but see her glassy-eyed, astride

her pied ride as she wended to her home,

sighing in her saddle set to the side,

clutching her cask of wine to her bos-ome.

 

Full sore my lovesick heart (and other parts) swell’d

as Cupid’s arrow shrived my mortal soul

and I resolved to plight my troth once held

by the Fair Youth at my watering hole.

 

Dark Lady, I fulsome cried, be my bride

and let us to Lethe flee and there be wed.

She fix-ed me full-faced but gimlet-eyed

and intoned words that ‘minded of the dead.

 

“Marry, not marry, for I’m wed to Sid

but as to your other needs, whatsay twenty quid?”

A farnarkeling good adventure

/ Doug Jacquier / 4 Comments

This my response to this week’s Terrible Poetry challenge to create an epic poem about a great adventure.

 

Upon a nonce, amidst general farnarkerling,

a fair maiden did set her sights

on a handsome prince in tights

so she could wear his ring a’sparkling.

 

In her way, as was her feckless fancy,

she feigned to plight her troth

to a handsome Visigoth

known as Screaming Nancy.

 

The handsome prince, with heart full sick,

swore and swore and swore and swore

that up with this he would not forbore

and plotted war, down to the last tooth and pick.

 

He gathered full his skirtling Scots all skittish

and filled his lungs

and spoke in tongues

of once more defending the breeches of the British.

 

Come battle day, his fulsome steed he mounted

and waved his sword

around the sward

then charged the Nancy boys uncounted.

 

Full well sounded the irony ring of wrath

‘gainst shields both stout and flimsy

‘til the prince’s tilt proved but whimsy

and he was vanquish-ed by the Visigoth.

 

The maiden shed a seemly tear or two

then plighted her troth

to the Visigoth

known as Screaming Nancy.

 

Footnote: The couple died without issue and the kingdom came under the demesne of the Angle-grinders, followed by the Saxons (aka the Sax Collectors) and then the Holy Roman Umpire.