Okay, folks. Another easy one for you on a playful Christian V Atheist theme, if such a thing is possible. The rhymes are very silly, and the rhyme scheme is AABB, CCDD, EEEE, FFFF.

---

 

If you bicker with the vicar

Then your evening might go -------,

But being beastly to the --------

Will not help your cause the leastly.

 

You can castigate the ------

And the tea-dance may pass faster,

But despite your verbal ------

You’ll find that faith and sense don’t mix.

 

Your reason will not reach a

Pious Pentecostal preacher

Who has never heard of ---------

And has Him upstairs as -------.

 

Damn this Dawkins talk your hawkin’!

Stir your tea and plunge your ---- in

Pies with hard boiled eggs and ---- in,

Fill your mouth and stop your squawkin’.

 

1. More rapid part of fingernail with hesitation? (7)
2. Religious man sounds like novelist J. B. (8)
3. Church tutor in tapas torment! (6)
4. Magic displays that prostitutes turn. (6)
5. Thinker to confusedly etch ‘zines.
6. Pedagogue often appears to be on the  whiskey? (7)
7. Cutlery found in road (4)
8. Meat from top Orkneys

SOLUTIONS TO CRYPTIC POEM 004: THE PEN

The pen hectors and seduces

Magnifies and reduces

It’s a window or a mask

A plaything to take to task

An instrument of rich catharsis

Excuse for sitting on our arses

It spills its blood on virgin page

Begetting life on life and stage

Teaches naughty children not to fidget

Can bore any, of any age, rigid

It will mollify a lover’s heart

Then write the page tears them apart

It’s the light in which we daily bathe

It’s the dark in us to know and save