The Gorko Gazette

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1.27.2025 6:47 AM

A Truly Bad Poem by Professor Stout

BUSHES!

Bushes!
so prickly, so stout
give Robby a spout
Bushy
browed vixens
King’s Spa Twenty-Four
Twenty-four bushels!
Brushes with leaves
root, stem and bush
Bushes that are briars!
liars, swollen tyres
Not only tygers
lose their stripes
— also poor bushes!

Commentary by Tark Mackintosh

‘Bushes!’ One of Professor Stout’s most explicit poems about bushes. The reader is left with little doubt of the poet’s abiding interest in horticulture.

prickly…stout Without question a reference to the poet’s own surname. The artist often embedded little clues in his verses, and this one seems to cry out for love and help. Yes, this line shouts, I may be outwardly unfriendly (prickly), but I am at heart a teddy bear man.

Robby Roberto Quinn, chief ‘archaeologist’ (in fact a private security officer) at the ruins of Uxmal in 1924, where Stout married his first wife, Clair, in an occult ceremony associated with the mystery religion Thelema. The pair spent the night in the Great Hall deep within the Pyramid of the Soothsayer, completely naked of course, and smeared with the blood of suckling ewes. Clair would later leave our poet, heart broken like a snapped bush, and marry Roberto Quinn in a legally binding ceremony in Mexico City.

Bushy / browed vixens The unibrow, so popular in Mexico in the early two-thirds of the Twentieth Century, makes its appearance, like a cultural tramp stamp, in the verses of Professor Stout. Or is it rather like a mosquito trapped in amber?

King’s Spa An expat gathering place for hedonists and perverts in Mérida, Yucatán, México. Our poet came, saw, and left almost immediately. His abhorrence of the expat lifestyle he witnessed during his time on the Peninsula practically leaps off the page.

bushels / Brushes The poet becomes momentarily confused and confuses bushes, brushes, and bushels. The metric system apparently is taking its savage toll on the bewildered foreigner.

briars Cf. prickly, above.

liars, swollen tyres Professor Stout had the tendency to adopt the midatlantic accent in speech, we are informed by his official biographer Ada Potter Barclay in her biography of the great man, Bushes or Blushes (1958, Pinguino, New Yark). The liars are the prickly bushes — the tyres the men provokingly poked in the midsection by the flaunting, Peninsular tarts.

tygers No fucking clue what is going on at this point.

stripes A reference to Professor Stout’s impersonation of a United States Army sergeant in an attempt to gain free passage home from Mérida, which pueblo he fled mere hours ahead of syndicate muscle sent to recover his gambling losses at King’s Spa. Stout always denied that he ever played cards in Mexico — and yet it is certainly true that he gambled on, and then lost fair Clair.

Image generated on Magic Studio