Spectator competition: TfL's terrible poems (plus: pets dish the dirt on their owners)

Transport for London’s efforts to use verse to encourage Tube users to mind their manners produced poems whose rhyme and scansion would have made William McGonagall blush. So it was over to the experts: competitors were invited to imagine that poets, living or dead, had been recruited to improve on the unlovely likes of: ‘We really don’t mean to chide/ But try to move along inside/ So fellow travellers won’t have to face/ An invasion of their personal space.’ Adrian Fry’s Emily Dickinson — ‘Because I would not mind the gap’ — was an impressive runner-up, as were Charles Clive-Ponsonby-Fane, Mike Morrison and Alanna Blake, but they were outstripped by those printed below, who pocket £15 each.

David Silverman/John Betjeman Come friendly bombs, and fall on those Who clip their nails or pick their nose Or drop their knickers on the train Twixt Wembley Park and Rayners Lane. Respect the genial, genteel folk Of Hampstead, Highgate, Gospel Oak; Spare leafy Essex excess noise: Preserve the peace of Theydon Bois!

Sylvia Fairley/Rudyard Kipling If you can cease to shout ‘I’m on the train!’ Assaulting ears with trivial conversation — Transported past the barriers of pain Your captive audience shrinks at your oration – Then curb your puerile prating, we implore, And trash your phone, employ a voice less shrill, you Will find there’s gold in silence; and, what’s more Your fellow travellers won’t be forced to kill you.