When you hear it languishing
and hooing and cooing and sidling through the front teeth,
the Oxford voice
or worse still
the would-be-Oxford voice
you don’t even laugh any more, you can’t.
For every blooming bird is an Oxford cuckoo nowadays,
you can’t sit on a bus nor in the tube
but it breathes gently and languishingly in the back of your neck.
And oh, so seductively superior, so seductively
self-effacingly
deprecatingly
superior. —
We wouldn’t insist on it for a moment
but we are
we are
you admit we are
superior. —