gleaned from a quick perusal of the Vikings exhibition at the British Museum
The Vikings were here, pillaging and minting coins.
The Vikings expanded in all directions when nobody was looking.
The Vikings were fond of bright colors and the whisper of silk against their hairy skins.
The Vikings steered their longships with special oars shaped like butter churns.
The Vikings filed their teeth for maximum impact when they gnawed on their shields like crazed Norway rats.
The Vikings invented tribal tattoos, gang signs, campfire sing-alongs and theoretical physics.
The Vikings’ chief deity had one eye and walked with a limp.
The Vikings were misunderstood loners who acted out violent fantasies of power.
The Vikings gave names to their swords and their shields, their boots and their favorite underwear.
The Vikings had female shamans whose magic staffs symbolically unwound the threads of fate.
The Vikings drank beer from wooden buckets and water—when they had to—from their pointy little helmets.
The Vikings dated yo’ mama before she got fat.
The Vikings selflessly contributed their DNA to the British gene pool.
The Vikings taught us how to say bleak and anger, glitter, ransack and egg.
The Vikings didn’t call themselves Vikings, but activist shareholders.
The Vikings were vertically integrated, and operated in all areas of the pillaging and slaving industry.
The Vikings exploited penalty charges on credit accounts held by most major northern European rulers.
The Vikings were directly involved in several major environmental and safety incidents, as well as numerous violations of human rights and good taste.
The Vikings were exceedingly fond of bling.
The Vikings employed poets to burnish their images and shape public expectations.
The Vikings disappeared in the 11th century at the height of their power, as the result of a leveraged buyout from Christendom Incorporated.
I wrote this today especially for an open-mike reading at the Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden. It seemed to go over pretty well. It occurred to me later that presenting a freshly minted poem to a roomful of strangers is pretty much what I do here every day (except that some of you aren’t strangers, of course). It was an extremely well-moderated reading, with time limits strictly but humorously enforced and a great diversity of readers — an interesting counterpoint to a much more staid reading by professional, establishment poets I’d attended several days before.
