Poetry is often funny, and because poetry lasts in the way that songs do but prose doesn’t the joke lasts. I read this poem for the first time a few days ago in “The Rattle Bag,” and I must confess that I thought that Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) was one of the Mersey Poets. I confused him with Adrian Henri, who together with Roger McGough and Brian Patten mingled poetry with rock and roll in the Swinging Sixties and made it sexy. Mitchell, a radical on the left, said: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” His poem is funny all the way through but builds with the funniest stanza at the end.

STRONG MAN

Mashed potatoes cannot hurt you, darling

Mashed potatoes mean no harm

I have brought you mashed potatoes

From my mashed potato farm.

LADY

Take away your mashed potatoes

Leave them in the desert to dry

Take away your mashed potatoes-

You look like a shepherd’s pie.

BRASH MAN

A packet of chips, a packet of chips,

Wrapped in the Daily Mail,

Golden juicy and fried for a week

In the blubber of the Great White Whale.

LADY

Take away your fried potatoes

Use them to clean your ears

You can eat your fried potatoes

With birds-eye frozen tears.

OLD MAN

I have borne this baked potato

O’er the Generation Gap,

Pray accept this baked potato

Let me lay it in your heated lap.

LADY

Take away your baked potato

In your fusty musty van

Take away your baked potato

You potato-skinned old man.

FRENCHMAN

She rejected all potatoes

For a thousand nights and days

Till a Frenchman wooed and won her

With pommes de terre Lyonnaise.

LADY

Oh my corrugated lover

So creamy and so brown

Let us fly across to Lyons

And lay our tubers down.