Porker's Ham and Grain-fed Eggs

The alms man likes Albacore tuna on single-wheat bread lightly toasted and left to cool. His grandmamma told him that the British preferred they’re toast stone-cool with whey curd on top. ‘They even have toast-racks’ she said ‘to sleeve the warm toast into’. ‘They like peanut butter on it?’ he asked. ‘Nope, just with curd and hard butter’ she said. ‘Not even a wee dram of jelly, grape or marmalade?’ ‘Just the way God made it, cold and hard to swallow’ she said, ‘and with curd and iced butter’. ‘Pads, you mean those wee pads of butter like you get at the fancy restaurants?’ he asked. ‘No, now listen for once, with hard-churned butter straight from the cows’ teat’. ‘Fancy, you mean fancy butter but from a fancy cow?’ His grandmamma gave him a stern dismissive look, the strings of her apron twiddling like nervous fingers round her waist, and went back to kneading a loaf of single-wheat bread.

Flue the spigot shit, the shot and narrow isn’t all it’s made out to be. Murmur stalk-stem, she isn’t all she’s made in to be. ‘Pads, you mean those wee pads of butter like you get at the fancy restaurants?’ he asked awake (all that offal awful, sluice-gate bilge, all that awful offal swirling down the drainpipe maw). Jimbo Mansard like Albacore tuna on single-wheat bread lightly toasted and left to cool. Me mama made it toast-side up with pads of wee batter and salted scrod.

(He wears a hatman’s hat, broad brimmed, felt brown and quail with feathers. He has on a haberdasher’s jacket, brownish gray with widespread lapels and a two-rose buttonhole. He rides a bicycle without a horn, flagon or bell. His trousers, brownish brown, are cinched round his ankles with tape; the cuffs tucked into his galoshes with object care).

‘I remember remembering that’ he said ‘and some other things, too’. ‘Do you own a bicycle?’ ‘Yes, two.’ ‘Two, my goodness two, how odd indeed, two’. ‘One for jockeying about the other for cycling errands and the so’ said he. ‘I like Porker’s ham and chicory pate’. ‘You do, yes I see you do, how strange and offal indeed’. ‘Porker’s ham and grain-fed eggs such a delectable parish treat’. ‘Me? Me I prefer them boiled yolk-side up with a wee poke of salt and paprika’. ‘You’re a cad you are, a real cad so you are’. ‘I prefer card, a real card so I am’. ‘I’m a billfold off the dim and sparrow, just a wee smidgen’. ‘So you say, so it is, it must be so you say, so it is, most certainly is’. ‘So I say, so it is I suppose’. (She drank Jonestown Gin from a tea cup, closeting it between the sewing basket and the laundry hamper, and swore she’s never read Neruda, though she did once tip the mailman at Christmastime. Her youngest child Rudy died from rickets, his legs so twisted and deformed that he had to have braces coddled between them, a piece of wood the size of a doorframe secured in place with metal screws and washers). ‘That’s a strange one, strange indeed’. ‘Yes, I’d say so myself, strange indeed, indeed I’d say’. ‘A billfold off the dim and sparrow so you say’ he said asking. ‘Just a wee smidgen, not enough to cause a tilt and rowdy’ he answered in saying.