Spring 2015
by James Graham
1
As soon as he got here
from the thirteenth century
he saw that the big money
is buried on treasure islands,
and to rob the rich
he had to hack.
As luck would have it
he found a merry man
called Spy-Eye Tuck,
a gifted password cracker
and another, Will the Geek,
a whizz-kid web injector
and in fourteen days
they had the hoodware ready.
2
They tried it on the crisply laundered
assets of the Russian oligarch
Gennadi Chestikoff. The arrows
hit the target: fifty million roubles
(five hundred thousand sterling, give or take
- they took). It worked. ‘Think big’, quoth Robin.
‘Where next, my merry men? The Caymans?
Virgins? Luxembourg? Those three, to start.
The Linnet's Wings Poetry
You’re the real deal, boys. I’ll leave you to it.
I’m going a-hunting’. So, smart but casual
in his avocado sweatshirt, he took in
the sights of the third-millenium city.
3
It was there he met young Marion,
an economics graduate from Lincoln who
had worked vacations as a chambermaid.
They got talking. His sixth sense told him
she was the real deal too, smart, honest,
as like to keep a secret as any man
or woman on Earth. He told her all
- well, nearly all – and there and then
she left her former life behind,
vowed never to rest until the harvest
was all gathered in. ‘And when it is,’
she added brightly, ‘you won’t hang on to it.
From all I’ve heard about you, Robin Hood,
you’ll give it to the poor’. ‘Certes’, quoth he
‘- God wot, I haven’t got the idiom yet oh, absolutely, give it to the poor, it’s what I do.’
‘You sound as if you hadn’t thought of it.
Or if you had, you never thought it through.
You can’t just call on peasants and give out
a bag of florins. Listen. I will make a plan’.