In The Dim Sum Restaurant Poem by Wild Bill Balding

How dim are the dim sum?

Are they just dim at sums
so those who fail their maths exam
are the only ones who get eaten?
(It sounds harsh, but a great way to raise
educational standards.)

Or are they victims of an IQ-based
fascist theory of the Master Race
that sees underachievers
rolled in sesame seeds and served
with hoi-sin sauce to the paying public?

Are their death-throes in the deep fat fryer
filmed as an Awful Warning
(Sum Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Mon-Roll) ,
shown on TV with the drink-drive adverts
to shock them into greater success?

Was the one with caviar on top
pulled from a playscheme's ballpool
without a chance to change once
the latest test results came out?

And what happens to the intelligent sum?
Do they work for the summum bonum,
write the Summa Theologica?
(Thomas Aquinas was a pastry parcel!)
Do they speak on Radio Hilversum,
public broadcasts about raising standards -
or maybe not! What if the caterers pay
for each dim sum handed in?
Are they in collusion, collaborators,
like the clan chiefs in the Clearances?
A Napoleonic levée, five dim sum per village
for the demands of the big city restaurants,
each year the conscripts signing up to die.

What if two clever sum breed a dim one?
Private tuition! Tutors inculcating calculus,
giving groundings in geometry,
trying to tease out trigonometry,
setting su-doku starters & Pythagorean plenaries...
and if that doesn't work, the dim sum must hide,
or join the Danish Resistance
- another sort of pastry, true, but that's the best
you're going to get. Pour me another Moutai. Thank you.