Dad's Army*
Do you like Dad's Army? Asks a nine-year-old on D2
Some day my prince will come blasts the box
I'll throttle her barks granddad
Callipers standing to At-tension!
Hold both his hands
We don't want him to scratch do we?
Orders the anaesthetist gassing him with relish
Eyes rolling back dollish
Hi ho hi ho sing TV dwarves
To the girl with cerebral palsy
All your dreams come true they do
Only if you take the final apple
When our lad returns a nurse with Red Sea hair
Plays music to empty blue chairs
With the purple octopus nodding in the playroom
Plastic dinosaurs wait, as does the IKEA temple
Parents discuss which McDonald's
While we mutter our goodbyes
Cool teenagers slide inside for dialysis
Curled and swallowed by the chair she cries
As a toddler with dwarfism escapes
The TV now declares its history
"Dad's Army" was first published in Lost Passports by Charles Jason Lee (Leicester: Troubador Publishing, 2005), p. 33. Return to poem