I stepped into a tropical bar. Simon Reeve was there in a slow dance, And I lost myself to his floppy fringe Whose sweat-soaked flappy fronds would Tickle my blushing cheeks, Whose stubble scraped at the twilit skies Like a cat’s claws on anaglypta, Whose come-to-bed eyes betrayed none Of the entitlement of his classical features But a yearning for a sweetness so virile That he could have been a treacle tart And I ached, how I ached, To be the custard.
Backpack merely decorative, Naive tone a faux Theroux, Poor man’s Palin, Cargo-trousered doyen of sand dunes And jungle trains, No armchair droner he, Riven with Reevisms, river crossings, Barrier reef rovings, Now gyrating for my pleasure in the aptly named Club Flamingo.
Simon Reeve whose dimpled smile Hauls in the night like a Titicatan net-lobber, Whose unblemished skin betrays the Goodness of various restorative unguents, Whose manly chin is jutted like the Bulbous bow of a speeding Shinkansen And probably twice as purposeful, Whose sensitive eyebrows are seldom parabolic, Yet neither do they quiver intense for Reevsie is an empathic soul, Whose backpack is admittedly superfluous, Whose torso is Michaelangeloian in its Sculpted accommodation of his lean yet Muscular frame on whose bounty I would Willingly consume a quadruple-decker cheeseburger Dipping a chip in a reservoir of mayonnaise Stored for convenience sake in his belly button.
Action man for aunties. Secret poet banging sand out his boots. Earnest and eager though neither over with either. Mortal enemy of Professor Brian Cox. No world-weary Whicker he, but a clamorous compassion And the kind of face That would make even Vladimir Putin Contemplate a five minute fumble In the broom cupboard.
Simon Reeve, whose tousled locks hold Within their definitely un-dyed verdantness A vitality that would put Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to shame, Whose rich deep Colombian coffee coloured eyes Might penetrate x-ray-like beneath layers so effectively As to pass right through the earth’s core every time He bends down to pat a puppy. Whose nostrils hardly flare. Whose afterthought goatee clings on like A countryside hilltop copse stunted By the choking emissions from a nearby pig farm Yet in whose branches barn owls berate the night With their haunted warbling, Whose luscious lips have tempted many a plastic surgeon To bemoan the artifice of their own creations And now before is delicate tongue-moistened plumpness, Whose sturdy shoulders in their perfect powerful paralleogramatic Precision Would easily raise a live rhinoceros clear out Of the Serengeti mud hole Into which it had stumbled probably distracted By the beauty of Simon Reeve’s face in the first place.
And I, Simon Reeve, I am that rhinoceros And this ain’t no mud hole, It’s the Club Flamingo And our song has now ended And our dance has now ended And you’ve picked up your backpack Which definitely doesn’t contain Just a couple of pillows to make it look full for the cameras, And off you go.
Robert Garnham 