Calling the Roll

As another full year ends,
let us salute our absent friends
 
Count Tosselkov who modelled pollen grains to scale in wax,
Whistle Murphy, who married seven women, each five years 
younger than the one before, Cardinal Dab Brockney 
who catalogued the thirty-nine sexes of angels, 
the Michel-Burkiss twins who circumnavigated the globe 
each year while they lived, and were scattered 
on the trade winds when they died, Ram Shah Pann 
who enamelled his virile member with turquoise and pearl, 
Ishmael Serif who perfected pellucid dreaming, Colonel P.D.Beeds 
who could see colour with his finger-tips, Pierre Chamberlait 
who conversed with molluscs,the Whittaker cousins who sighted 
the first green mammal before they were lost in Sumatra,
Sugarcane Smith who wrote a twenty-three volume Epic 
of the Great Venusian Wars and burnt it immediately, 
Red Haslam who bred flying saddlebacks, James Wade 
who invented stained-glass bullets, Rabbi Hyram Hite 
who proclaimed that Doubt is the true foundation
of Knowledge, Trapp von Cutler who abducted aliens, 
and Sydney 'Slim' Milch who pioneered the No-Food Diet.
 
Please charge your glasses, gentlemen;
we shall not see their like again.
 

© M. A. Griffiths