Ode To The Spineless Bastard Who Cloned My Debit Card

Yesterday, I found out that large sums of money had been stolen from my account. I am now officially a member of the ever-growing club of identity fraud victims. Hooray! What was especially galling was discovering the perpetrator stayed at the Hilton and racked up a huge booze and casino bill at my expense. All this time I've been quietly slaving away, a hard-up poet living in abject poverty, when it seems I was earning enough to support a fabulous champagne lifestyle.

It's weird. Somehow, the idea of an alternate Tim Clare, the glamorous, debonair Gentlemen Poet, makes me feel better about my own mediocrity. It's like an apology for the life I've lived, as if the universe is saying: Somewhere, out there, in another dimension, you did everything right.

See the dandified Adonis
Decked in golden cape and tie
On his way to pen some honest
Poetry – o, what a guy!
Hear this cultured upper-cruster
Drunk with trinkets, whores, and wine
Sharing tales of spunk and bluster
He’s one card you can’t decline
Taste his tainted perspiration
Smell his blend of fine colognes
Eau de Gnawing Desperation
Fag smoke, cordite, pheromones
Heart of gobshite, grin of God,
Gentleman Poet with a massive wad

He’s all I’ve ever longed to be
And yet – a bitter irony –
His life is broken binary
Where zero’s him
And one is me.
‘Now Delphine and Hermione,
I must insist you dine with me.
The Chateau Sixty-Nine, oui, oui,
He’ll fetch it from the winery.
Two ladies in such finery
I rarely get the time, you see,
It makes one pine so for Paris
Where is that Gallic swine? Henri!
The staff all take a shine to me
They’d probably let me dine for free
They even made a sign for me
With little lines of poetry.
I like to read them as I dine
I don’t tell customers they’re mine
Don’t want attention from the rabble.’
You write verse?
‘Well, yes... I dabble.’

O towering colossus!
O Timothy Clare!
Amassing huge losses
At Craps with such flair
Then laughing it off
As he tosses his hair
Like some high-living, solid-chinned
Charles Baudelaire!
O Timmy J Clare! O Timmy J Clare!
Gifted, uplifted, by talent so rare!
What a singular character I proved to be
When I stole all my money by acting as me
One thousand, two thousand, o! Sweet creeping fuck!
The grace of a swan king, the bill of a duck.
A luck-drunken, lyrical, louche Fred Astaire
I am broke from your lavishness, Mr Tim Clare

If you’ve really a yen for identity theft
Finish the job then, take all that’s left
No, don’t panic, I’m not going to call in ‘the fuzz’ –
You’re a much better Tim Clare than I ever was
Go on, take my smile!
Take the way that I sing!
Steal my dress sense, my walk,
Come along, everything!
Get stuck in! Take my dandruff!
Here! Have my bad knee!
Come handcuff yourself
To my love of TV!
All my strange superstitions!
My lack of discretion!
My predisposition towards mild depression!
My disastrous dearth of finesse in the sack.
My fear that the ones I love most don’t love back.

Fill your boots, until every last foible is gone.
You can be me, mate,
And I’ll be no one.