Giselle went down to the Supermart
For milk, and a loaf of bread,
‘Don’t be too long,’ said her husband, Tom,
‘It looks like rain ahead.’
The sky was dark and the clouds were grey
And a breeze was gusting the trees,
As she walked a block to the corner shop
The road was covered in leaves.

She tarried a while at the Mercers,
Checked the price on a bolt of silk,
Picked up a colourful tie-dyed scarf
Before collecting the milk.
She noticed the aisles were empty when
She got around to the bread,
The only girl at the checkout said:
‘It looks like a storm ahead.’

The thunder came rumbling over the shop
And the rain began to pour,
Giselle had nothing to keep her dry
So stood by the sliding door,
She read the messages on the board
For Sale, to give or swaps,
But one stood out like a weeping sore,
‘This is where reason stops!’

‘This is where reason stops,’ it said
In an ugly, spidery scrawl,
The damp had made the lettering run
And the ink dripped down the wall.
Guiselle had shivered and stepped aside
As she noticed the second line,
‘You’ll never be able to find your way
When caught in the tangle of time.’

The lightning flashed and it lit the store
But nobody else was there,
Not even the only checkout girl,
She’d gone, but heaven knew where.
Giselle dashed out to a clearing sky
Where the rain had ceased to pour,
She checked the time, was surprised to find
She’d been gone, two hours or more.

Tom would be more than mad, she thought
As she hurried along the way,
She’d never been able to keep good time,
For it seemed to slip away.
She never had kept her appointments
And Tom had been known to yell:
‘You’d keep the Devil himself in thrall
If you went to Hell, Giselle!’

The sun was dipping beneath the earth
And leaving a twilight glow,
She noticed that all the leaves had gone
That were there, a while ago,
There were fences now she’d never seen
And some gardens overgrown,
And on the block where her house had been
She was stood there, all alone.

There wasn’t a house, there wasn’t a brick,
Just bushes and bundles of weeds,
And trees, she turned for a second look,
She’d planted them all from seeds.
She thought that she must have lost her way
And ran to the corner to check,
The sign, as always, said ‘Shepherds Lane’
And a chill ran down from her neck.

She knocked on the screen of the house next door
And her neighbour, Ted, came out,
He cried, ‘Good God! You must be a ghost,’
And called his wife with a shout.
‘Where is my husband Tom,’ she said,
‘And where is my lovely home?’
‘Your Tom’s been dead for a dozen years
Since you left him here on his own!’

‘The house burnt down and they cleared the block
When they found him dead inside,
It was just a year since you took off
And he said that his heart had died.’
‘But I’ve only been two hours,’ she said,
‘I’ve just come back from the shops;
I should have known there was something wrong,
This is where reason stops!’

David Lewis Paget

There’s a scurrying sound of something, burrowing,
Down in the depths of the dungeons, hurrying,
Skittering, pittering-pattering, scattering
When there’s a footstep, hear them chattering:
‘Here come the lords, and here comes the vassal,
Tripping their way through Cockroach Castle.’

Here come the ladies, all in their finery
Tripping and sipping the wine from the winery,
Trailing their silks, their satins and bustling,
Up in the ballroom, while the rustling
Army beneath the sounds of their razzle
Is down in the depths of Cockroach Castle.

Spilling their millions up in the glooming
Out from the flagstones, terror is looming,
Up on the awnings, hung from the ceiling
Under the swish of the skirts they’re stealing,
Dropping in hair, and burrowing faster,
Cockroach Castle is set for disaster.

Suddenly all of the room is screaming
Flapping of hands, the roaches are teeming,
Myriad hordes in the Carbonara,
Candles are tipped from the candelabra,
Choking smoke from the candles guttered,
Flames leap up from the ones that stuttered.

Clothing and flags and the awnings razing
Silks and satins flare up, and blazing,
Roaches in eyes and ears, they’re rasping
Clogging their throats, to leave them gasping,
There isn’t a lady or lord, or vassal
To come out alive from Cockroach Castle!

David Lewis Paget

She wandered down to the rocky beach
On the first Monday in June,
She wore a shawl, and carried a wreath
And sat for the afternoon,
She’d wait til the sun was sinking low
And shadows moved in the caves,
Then stride out into the rising tide
And cast her wreath on the waves.

She didn’t flinch if the waves were high
Or the storm clouds brought her rain,
She gazed out past the horizon while
Her face was creased with pain,
When lightning flickered across the sky
She knew that the gods could see,
And wrung her hands with a terrible cry,
‘Will none of you pity me?’

‘Take me,’ she cried at the rising tide,
‘Take me,’ she groaned at the sky,
‘You’ve taken the only thing I loved
And not even told me why!’
She threw herself at the foam-fleck’d waves
Where the swell would rise and breach,
But ever the tide in its forward ride
Would cast her back on the beach.

She sheltered then in the echoing caves
That dotted the cliff face shore,
And tears had streamed from a source of grace
The gods had preserved once more,
She heard the echoes as waters lapped,
Or thundered in at the cave,
A voice that ever had held her rapt,
‘Be brave, my love, be brave!’

She shut her eyes and she reached on out
For the source of the voice’s charms,
And moaned for a distant memory
That had held her once in his arms,
But the sea was keeping his secrets now,
She could only guess, and pine,
She couldn’t know that he lay below
Near the coast of Palestine.

A stranger came on the woman there,
One of the gypsy folk,
Just as the lightning flickered once
And he wrapped her in his cloak.
He took her up to the top of the cliff
Where the unknown future lies,
As she turned aside to wave goodbye
There was lovelight in his eyes.

David Lewis Paget

The Little Withering Rep. had met
To rehearse their pantomime,
They’d left it a little late for Christmas,
Could it be done in time?
‘We have a choice, we can do Snow White,
Or Peter Pan would be good,
But we have the sets for another play,
‘The Wicked Witch of the Wood!’

Their hands went up for ‘The Wicked Witch,’
They thought it would be the best,
For Meryl Rose had a wart on her nose
And another one on her chest.
‘Meryl can play the wicked witch
As I think it’s understood!’
But Meryl pouted, she wanted to play
Little Red Riding Hood.

‘I’m always cast as the ugly *****,’
She cried, ‘But what about her?
She always gets the plummiest parts,
The ones with a bit of flair.’
But Helen stuck her nose in the air
And sniffed, ‘I’m younger than you.
You get to play the character parts,
I’m sweet, and innocent too.’

‘Now let’s not fight, it’s a Gala Night,’
The Director said, ‘Let’s cast!
Norman, you’ll be the noble prince,
And Fred can be Gormenghast.
Julia, you can be the Page
But you’ll have to improvise,
We’ll have you girt with the shortest skirt
For you have the longest thighs.’

‘We’ll have to steal from the other tales
For the script is not yet writ,
Helen, you get the sleeping part
For the apple that you’ve bit,
The littlest ones can play the dwarves
And run around on their knees,
Don’t worry, Matt, you can play a bat
And hang from one of the trees.’

They all got into their costumes,
Fancy cloaks with a funny hat,
But Albert Hook had been overlooked,
He dressed as a giant rat.
‘We’ll write in a part for everyone,’
For some had been looking glum,
‘You can be Jack and the Beanstalk, Mac,
And Tim can be ‘Fi-Fo-Fum!’

The curtain raised on the opening night
To reveal a darkened wood,
A giant bat fell out of a tree
To land where the Page was stood,
She shrieked, and clung to the wicked witch
Who was straddling broom and stick,
It knocked the apple out of her hand
That rolled in the orchestra pit.

‘Please can I have my apple back?’
She whispered over the lights,
The cellist was shaking his head at that,
He’d already taken a bite!
The sleeping beauty was not asleep,
The dwarves were looking dumb,
And Jack had shaken the beanstalk then
To the sound, ‘Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum!’

Nobody seemed to know what to do
The rat ran over the floor,
The cellist in the orchestra pit
Then flung back the apple core,
The Witch ran over to Helen then
Who screamed in a long, high note,
‘You’re mad if you think I’m eating that!’
But the Witch rammed it down her throat.

After they’d called the ambulance
And carted Helen away,
The police came in for the errant Witch
And said, ‘You will have to pay!
A joke’s a joke, but you tried to choke
The lead with an apple core!’
While the dwarves were rolling around in fits
As the audience fled for the door.

David Lewis Paget

The house had an evil aspect as
It hung out over the street,
Casting a permanent shadow there
Where the market stalls would meet,
The first floor was half-timbered, with
The ground floor made of stone,
The windows were made of pebble glass
And the window frames of bone.

No one had lived in the house for years
Til the Robinson’s moved in,
A couple, straight from the wedding church
Where they’d cleansed themselves from sin,
They’d listened to all of the rumours that
The house had its share of ghosts,
But the cheapness of the peppercorn rent
Had influenced them most.

The house was built where a charnel house
Had stood in the days of plague,
Where later a debtors’ prison stood
Though its history was vague,
They said there had been a gallows there
With a trapdoor through the floor,
And the arm of the ancient gallows now
Was the lintel of a door.

But the Robinson’s had sailed right in
With a mop and a whisking broom,
‘In no time, it’ll be **** and span,’
Said Sally, within the gloom,
While Brad had opened the shutters then
To let all the light stream in,
‘We’ll flush the ghosts from their waiting posts
With a broom and a pound of Vim!’

They dusted down the old furniture
Left sitting since George the Fourth,
And turned the old oak table round
So the end was facing north,
‘But still there’s a dampness in the air,
And a tension that feels grim,’
Sally said, as they lay in bed,
And she clung, so close to him.

‘Are you sure that they can’t get in,’ she said
‘Now we’ve flushed them out in the street?’
But Brad was trying to understand
Why the bed was cold at his feet.
‘Why are the sheets so damp,’ he said,
‘And they’re cold, as cold as sin,’
Sally was shivering, fit to burst
Though the sun came streaming in.

They sat at the old oak table with
Their bowls of soup, home-made,
And Sally reached out to hold his hand
But he started back, dismayed,
The soup was thick in the serving bowl
It was still three-quarters full,
When a swirl in the murky liquid then
Revealed a grinning skull.

Sally shrieked, but she couldn’t speak
And Brad had held his breath,
‘We’ve got to get out of this house today,
We’re surrounded here by death.’
The shutters slammed on the windows and
The doors flew shut on their own,
And barring the pebble windows were
The frames that were made of bone.

The people out in the market heard
The screams at an early hour,
Looked knowingly at each other, said,
‘They have them in their power!’
And Brad was hung from the lintel when
They finally broke inside,
While Sally was dead by a grinning skull
In the dress of a new-wed bride.

David Lewis Paget

I was part of the crew of a Sloop-of-War
That had sailed in the Caribbean,
We were caught asleep in the port one night
By the crew of a Brigantine.
They loosed a broadside, seven guns
As the Skull and the Bones flew high,
And I was dragged to the pirate ship
Where they said, ‘You’ll serve, or die!’

There wasn’t a choice to be had back then,
So I climbed aloft on the mast,
Setting the rig of the fore topsail
And making the halyards fast,
They made me stay in the Crows Nest then
To be swept by the wind and rain,
With only a couple of tots of ***
To deal with my aches, and pain.

I kept lookout on the pirate brig
For His Majesty’s ships, and land,
They knew we wouldn’t stand much of a chance
As a Privateer Brigand,
We sought to shelter within a cove
In an island, not on a chart,
And rowed ashore in a longboat there
With the bosun, Jacob Harte.

Captain Keague had stayed on the ship
With the bloodiest of his crew,
The rest of us had been pressed to sea
To do what we had to do.
We filled our barrels with water from
A rill that flowed from the hill,
And gathered fruit that we’d never seen
From trees with an earthy feel.

The trees had tendrils that waved about,
And trunks that were black and charred,
Just like a fire had raged there once
And left them, battle-scarred.
A voice rang out in a clearing there,
‘Hey mates, head back to the sea,
Don’t let the tendrils fasten on you
Or you’ll all end up like me.’

And deep in the trunk was a human face
With its skin all burnt and black,
The pain was etched on his weathered skin,
‘Look out, these trees attack!
We tried to burn them away, but they
Caught every one of the crew,
That fruit you carry is poison, mates,
They’ll be the end of you!’

The tendrils whipped and the tendrils slashed
And they wrapped round Jacob Harte,
He hadn’t much time to scream before
They seemed to tear him apart,
And each of the crew was tangled there,
Was absorbed into a tree,
I made it back to the beach that day
Though I’m anything but free.

The roots of the trees had reached on out
To the Brigantine in the bay,
Curled like manacles round its decks
And torn its masts away,
They dragged it up on the sandy beach
And they crushed it to a shell,
Caught the crew in their tendrils too
And Captain Keague as well.

I’ll put this note in a bottle, send it
Floating off in the sea,
Hoping that someone picks it up,
It’s the last you’ll hear from me.
Don’t let them seed in the world out there
These tendril trees are cursed,
And keep this Island from off the map,
If not, I fear the worst!

David Lewis Paget

There are some who consider suicide,
You can see it in their eyes,
They forget the hurt of their loved ones
When they fail to say goodbyes,
They see no point in the gift of life,
Say it doesn’t work for them,
But we walk on by, and we let them die
By some careless theorem.

I noticed the girl in the local church
She was down upon her knees,
Her shoulders shaking with silent sobs
As she stared at the altarpiece,
Her eyes were glazed as she walked on by
It was then that I knew, for sure,
She’d be walking off to an awful fate
If she walked alone through the door.

I caught her up and I walked with her
And I said, ‘I know what you think,
But this will pass, it’s a half full glass,
What you have to do is drink.’
She turned a tear-stained eye to me
And she said, ‘But what would you know?
Your life is a bed of roses now,
But mine is a horror show!’

I tried to draw her out from herself
And she seemed to want to talk,
We wandered down to the Esplanade
And went for a long, slow walk,
Her parents, they were divorced, she said,
Her father had disappeared,
Her mother was mired in drugs and drink,
It was DNA she feared.

‘I don’t want to end like her,’ she said,
‘I don’t want to go like him,
My older brother just hanged himself,
I don’t want to go like Tim.
There’s pain and heartache each way I turn,
I shouldn’t be here at all,’
I put my arm round her shoulders then,
And leant on the old seawall.

‘The life you have is a gift from God,
You can’t just throw it away,
We all have the choice to soldier on
To a brighter, better day.’
I thought that my words had helped her then
When I left her, shaking her head,
That was at three in the afternoon,
By six o’clock, she was dead!

David Lewis Paget

It looked all right through the windows of
Our cosy sitting room,
The day was light and the sun was bright
But the house was like a tomb,
The other rooms were as cold as hell
With their stalactites of ice,
That dripped from the bedroom ceiling down
To meet the stalagmites.

I’d settled Eve on the couch and spread
A blanket round her arms,
I didn’t think I should tell her, just
In case she became alarmed,
She’d spent a week in the sitting room
For she wasn’t feeling well,
How do you say, ‘We’ve fallen into
The Seventh Circle of Hell!’

They taught us the laws of physics were
Impossible to change,
Gravity, mass, and basic math
Had a certain, definite range,
But men of science had interfered
With the particle known as ‘God’,
They’d built the Hadron Collider and
The results, they said, were odd.

I could have told them how odd they were
When I went outside to see,
My car was covered in mushrooms
And a train sat up in the tree.
A whale was floating beneath the Moon
And a porpoise lay in the park,
The light was bright in the sitting room
But outside, it was dark.

Nothing remained the way it was
For all the colours had changed,
The lawn, the colour of strawberry jam
And the sky was rearranged,
The stars were falling like sequins in
A cluster of drops like rain,
And ice was forming up on the eaves
That tasted like champagne.

I went inside and I slammed the door,
I turned on the News at 6,
They said there’d been an apology
But it wouldn’t be hard to fix,
They’d run the Collider backwards to
The way that they’d done before,
And hopefully, the ‘particle God’
Would be as he’d been once more.

I sat with Eve as the sun went down
And I tried to keep her still,
Away from the hallway mirror so
She wouldn’t scream or squeal,
The lines were deepening on her face
As our lease on life had lapsed,
I hoped she wouldn’t go out today
With the world outside, collapsed.

The sun rose up in the morning as
It had for a million years,
And everything was familiar,
They’d run the thing in reverse.
The News went back to the good old things
We were used to, from before,
Stabbings, murders, infanticide
And that good old standby, war!

David Lewis Paget

It was just on the stroke of midnight,
I was going to go to bed,
But I had to pass by Charlie’s room
So I hung back there, instead,
I could hear the rattle of drums that came
From under his bedroom door,
And then the sound of a French ‘Huzzah!’
From a Napoleonic war.

I thought, ‘He’s at it again, he’s got
The Frenchies marching east,
He’s going to Borodino, where
He’s got a chance, at least,
He’s leading the French Grand Armée
As Napoleon did before,
But I couldn’t get in to stop him, as
He’d locked his bedroom door.

I shook my head and I went to bed,
There was no point hanging round,
For Charlie, he’d be up all night
‘Til the Armée went to ground,
By dawn he’d have them dragging back
From the Russian ice and snow,
And wouldn’t be fit to go to school
‘Til he’d had a sleep, you know.

He wasn’t a kid like other kids
He wouldn’t play with a phone,
He didn’t get into computer games
But he spent his time alone.
He didn’t make friends so easily
For he never went out to play,
But stuck his head in a history book
And would read and read all day.

They said he must have been gifted in
Some strange, abnormal way,
He used his imagination for
The games he wanted to play,
His mind reached back to another time
Where the personae were dead,
And brought them back for a second chance
On the counterpane of his bed.

I caught a glimpse of the action once
In a crack through his bedroom door,
A galleon moored in a harbour by
An armed Conquistador,
He saw me there and he slammed the door
And he said, ‘Don’t interfere!
I’m trying to raise the English Fleet
And I can’t if you’re standing there!’

His mother took him to town one day
To see a psychologist,
Who said, ‘He lives in a world of his own,
I think he’s really blessed.
We all grow out of our childish ways
And I think he’ll be the same.’
He thought it was all in Charlie’s head
‘Til the day that ‘Little Boy’ came.

He’d read and read of the second war
For a month until that day,
When I heard the aircraft engines I
Just knew, the ‘Enola Gay’,
I beat and beat upon Charlie’s door,
Broke out in a cold, cold sweat,
But the plane took off, and I grabbed the wife
And we’d still be running yet.

We were out in the road when the roof blew off
With a mighty blast and roar,
And the mushroom cloud was curling up
While we lay, flat out on the floor,
Charlie had gone from our lives for good
With his gift, and his bag of tricks,
Hard to believe that he had the power,
For Charlie was only six!

David Lewis Paget

The ground had rumbled for quite some time
It was only a minor quake,
The people grumbled, it came and went
But it kept them all awake,
‘They say there was a volcano here
A billion years ago,
But it’s long since dead, the geologists said,
And there’ll be no lava flow.’

They’d built the suburb on rising ground,
And roads, right up to the peak,
The ground was rocky and unforgiving
The soil was grey and weak,
So little grew on that rising crest
Just the odd saltbush or so,
They couldn’t drill through the rock beneath
To help their bushes grow.

I would venture out and would take the air
When the house cooled down at night,
But always felt there was something there
That would make me feel uptight,
I felt the rumble, under my feet
It was like a muffled roar,
And I thought a whimsical thought one night,
It was like an old man’s snore.

One night I wandered up to the crest
And I saw two bushes move,
They seemed to tremble and flutter there
Just above a ball shaped groove,
The rumble stopped as I stood and watched
From under the starlit skies,
The bushes opened to crystal orbs,
Just like a pair of eyes.

They fixed me there in their crystal stare
And I didn’t dare to breathe,
The summit started to shake and move,
And then it began to heave,
The houses built on the crest fell down
It was like a huge hiccup,
And I fell tumbling to the ground
As the Mountain God stood up!

David Lewis Paget

They took their shovels and digging tools
To the top of Highgate Hill,
They walked in a deadly silence there
In the dusk, in the evening chill,
They picked their way through the deep-laid bones,
The monuments, great and small,
And looked for the plain Rossetti stone
In their search for Elizabeth Siddal.

That red-haired, wraithlike, ghostly girl
Who had charmed the PRB,
She'd sat, at first, for Deverell
Who was doomed, with Bright's Disease,
She'd fallen hard for the artist then
Though her love was never returned,
For Deverell died so suddenly -
It was as if her love was spurned.

She sat for Dante Gabriel,
For Holman Hunt, Millais,
As the model for drowned Ophelia
In an ice cold bath she lay,
She lent her beauty to every brush,
Each stroke laid bare her soul,
When she looked around for herself she found
There was nothing left at all.

Rossetti had kept her close to him
As he slowly became obsessed,
He scribbled a dozen portraits from
Her head to her heaving breast,
He placed her high on a pedestal,
A Madonna in all but name,
But kept his physical love from her
That she might not suffer shame.

He penned the poems he wrote for her
In a small, grey calf-skin book,
He carried the poems everywhere
As a proof of the love it took,
He made no copies, he held them close
They were food for a future muse,
For his art and poetry vied with him -
It was painting he would choose.

But she; who knew what rent her soul,
The cravings she despaired?
She sipped at the potion laudanum
As her heart and her mind were bared,
She scribbled the weary verses that
Spoke love, of a love long-lost,
While Dante frolicked with Annie Hughes
At Elizabeth Siddal's cost.

As Lizzie despaired on laudanum
She had ceased to be of use,
Her visage was sad, and aged and drawn
In the sick room of abuse,
While girls with youth, vitality
And an earthy yen for sin
Like ***** Cornforth, came to sit -
And Rossetti let them in.

They wed, but much as a faded dream
The knot had been tied too late,
As Lizzie, dying a little each day
Succumbed to a morbid fate,
For one dark night she had laid her down
Penned a final note, to whit:
'My life has become so miserable
That I want no more of it.'

She lay by an empty laudanum phial,
Rossetti was quite distraught,
He'd loved her, but with a purer love
Than his lust or his money bought,
His grief was such, as he laid her down
In her coffin, she looked so fair,
That he placed the book of his poems
Between her cheek and her auburn hair.

The years went on and he sank himself
In a pit of despond, unwell,
Withdrew from his friends and dosed himself
With a phial of chloral,
His painting suffered, his income too,
He turned to the ancient muse,
And thought of the poems beyond the grave,
He knew that he'd have to choose!

He wrote to Charles Augustus Howell
A rogue that he'd used before,
To test him; whether to dig her up
Or to lose his poems forever;
Howell replied he should get them back,
Or he'd lose them to death, for good,
'Your works are the works of genius,
Bring them back to the world - You should!'

So Howell, he toiled up Highgate Hill
While Dante hid in his lair,
Too scared to look on his love again,
His muse with the auburn hair,
A fire was lit in the dead of night
The coffin was raised on high,
His love was torn from her deathly stare
They could almost hear her sigh.

The book was caught in her tangled hair
Which had filled the coffin's space,
And she was lovely, and quite serene
As they lifted the book from her face,
They lowered her gently, back in the ground
That had served as her awful tomb,
She lay defiled like a bride, reviled,
But without her lawful groom.

Rossetti published his poems then,
They sold by the thousandfold,
For Howell had leaked the story out
That he hadn't wanted told;
But a fate awaited Augustus Howell
A revenge that would beggar belief,
He was found, throat cut in the gutter -
With a coin, tight clenched in his teeth!

David Lewis Paget

I was sent to work at the old Repat.
It was forty years since the war,
Those ancient diggers would sit and swear
At the pain of the limbs they wore,
The wounds would open as years went by,
They’d come for another slice,
That war was never over for them,
And morphine was paradise.

I saw one veteran struggle and curse
As he ripped at the buckles and straps,
The new prosthesis had rubbed him raw
As his knee began to relapse.
He tore the leg from his wounded stump
Sat on his bed, and roared,
Then swung the article over his head
And flung it across the ward.

The others had ducked as the leg took off
And bounced off the opposite wall,
‘I’ll have to report you,’ the nurse exclaimed,
‘It’s a good leg, after all!’
‘You wear it then,’ was the man’s response,
‘For it’s driving me insane,
What would you know of Flanders Fields?
You wouldn’t deal with the pain!’

My job was to settle and calm him down
So I asked him about his leg,
‘When and where did you lose it, Dig?’
The veteran tossed his head.
‘You’ve heard of a place called Flanders Fields
Where the bullets came in like hail?
Well, I was there with the Anzac’s, son,
At a place called Passchendaele.’

‘Our Generals were trying to ****** us,
I swear, on my mother’s head,
They kept on sending us over the top
Until half of the men were dead.
The German gunners would enfilade
As we struggled against the mud,
I’ll never forget the battlefield,
It was spattered with bones and blood.

They’d send artillery shells across
At the height of a soldier’s knee,
We’d watch them come as they parted the grass,
They were Grasscutters, you see!
Well, I was running with bayonet fixed
And praying for God’s good grace,
When suddenly I was lying there,
I’d tumbled, flat on my face.’

‘It’s strange that I never felt a thing,
When the Grasscutter got me,
It took a while ‘til I saw my leg
Was gone, from under the knee.
But that was the end of the war for me,
The end of the life I’d known,
I spent some time back in Blighty, then
I came on a ship, back home.’

I never chided those men in there
Though they’d curse and swear, and roar,
For every man was a hero where
They'd trudged in mud through the war.
That Repat. job was a fill-in job
And I left, still young and hale,
But I never forgot the Grasscutter
Or the man from Passchendaele.

David Lewis Paget

She wore a net that covered her hair,
A shawl in a peasant green,
A ragged dress that covered her breast
But with nothing in-between,
Her legs were scratched and covered in mud
And her feet were shod in clogs,
I wouldn’t have noticed her passing, but
For the barking of the dogs.

She looked aside at the dogs that barked
And she made an evil sign,
Sent them panicking back to the barn
And I called, ‘Hey you, they’re mine!’
She looked at me from under the net
With glittering eyes of scorn,
‘Your dogs will not recover themselves
‘Til the Black Beast comes, at dawn!’

I stood agape and I watched her pass
To the shade down by the creek,
She kicked her clogs on the dewy grass
And she washed her legs and feet.
I wandered down and I stood aside,
‘You’re a stranger to these parts!’
‘I’ve been away, but I think I’ll stay
‘Til the Mass of the Woodland starts.’

It wasn’t really a village then,
Was more a scatter of homes,
Built on the edge of the woodland where
The cottagers laid their bones,
The cemetery wandered into the trees
With the headstones, green with moss,
And each was graven beneath the green
With a dark, upended cross.

‘The people here are strange, you know,
They don’t like passers-by,
You’d best be moving along before
The sun sinks in the sky.’
She laughed a terrible laugh that sent
Cold shivers down my back,
‘I’m only here for the sacrifice,
You can tell your Brothers that!’

The people came from the cottages
At dusk in their hoods and capes,
Wandered into the ancient hall
Half hid by its ivy drapes,
They genuflected before the font
With its rust and ****** stains,
That sat before the upended cross
On a wall that was hung with chains.

A man stood tall at the podium
In a hood that hid his face,
I caught a glimpse of the mask he wore,
A skull that he held in place.
‘The ravening beast will be abroad
When the Moon is full and round,
We have to be at the woodland creek
Before the beast comes down.'

He led the way to the woodland creek
Where the girl had sat in wait,
‘I hope you’ve chosen your sacrifice
For the time is getting late.’
A cloud then blotted the moonlight out
And we heard a beastly roar,
The girl had gone when the moon had shone
And her clothes lay on the floor.

And in her place, a hideous beast
As black as a lump of pitch,
Leapt on one of the Brothers there
And dragged him into a ditch.
It mauled and ripped at his carcass there,
He didn’t have time to scream,
While I took off, back to my croft,
Away from the nightmare scene.

I lay in the barn, beside my dogs,
They seemed to be terrified,
I sat and loaded my .22
My eyes were open wide,
The Beast came prowling around at dawn
Just as the girl had said,
I shot it once, and between the eyes
But the girl lay there, instead.

David Lewis Paget

The house that I rented was falling down,
I picked up the place for a song,
There weren’t many rooms that were liveable,
The plumbing and wiring were wrong,
I lit up a paraffin lantern there
To lighten the dark and the gloom,
But while still exploring, I thought I heard
A voice in the upstairs room.

I hadn’t been up in the loft ‘til then,
I’d not even mounted the stairs,
The rooms were a midden of broken toys
Of lopsided tables and chairs,
I carted the worst of them out the back,
The fire that I set lit the gloom,
Again from a window above me there
Was the voice in the upstairs room.

I couldn’t make out a word that it said
It grumbled and mumbled and moaned,
I stood and I listened and scratched my head
And to tell you the truth, I groaned.
I didn’t know what lay above me there
A squatter, a thief or a ghost,
A thief didn’t matter, a squatter I’d scatter
What worried me most was a ghost.

I went and I stood by the bottom stair
Looked up, with a feeling of doom,
The voice was whispering somewhere there,
‘You’d better be leaving here soon!’
‘The only one leaving this place is you,
Whatever, whoever you are!’
‘The only way you will be rid of me
Is by putting the lid on the jar.’

I plucked up the courage and took the stairs,
Was running, but two at a time,
The dust was heavy and thick up there,
Whipped up as I started to climb,
A haze was suffused in the room at the back
Where the window was beaming in light,
And there at a ghostly harpsichord
Was sitting a woman in white.

I stood stock still as she started to play
Bach’s Little Prelude in C,
The notes hung quivering, shivering in
The haze of the air by me,
I saw right through the woman, the dress
And the harpsichord to the wall,
There was no substance that I could see,
No substance to them at all.

The music stopped, she was looking at me
And she let out a long, loud sigh,
‘I’ve only played for two hundred years
To some visitors, passing by.
It’s never the same as it was at court
With the crinolines, bustles and lace,
And most have fled when the music played,
Without ever seeing my face.’

I looked at the jar on the mantelpiece,
A Funeral Urn with its store,
And ash was spilling, leaving a trace
With the lid that lay on the floor,
I bent to touch it and pick it up
But the woman had let out a cry,
‘I pray sir, never replace the lid,
For then I would surely die.’

I placed the lid on the Funeral Urn,
Turned back to look at her face,
The room was empty, the harpsichord
Had gone, not leaving a trace.
There was no sign of the woman in white
And the haze had faded away,
I turned and slowly descended the stairs
With a feeling of vague dismay.

For weeks I scrubbed and I tended that house,
Installed all my goods and wares,
But often found I was listening for
The sound of that voice upstairs.
So I crept in there on a winter’s eve
And I slipped the lid off the jar,
Went silently down the stairs again
Still listening, from afar.

The harpsichord struck a strident note
And it woke me up in my chair,
Then suddenly she began to sing
In a voice that was sweet and fair.
I only cover the Funeral Urn
If the vicar is passing by,
But sometimes sit at the head of the stairs
Just to hear the woman sigh.

David Lewis Paget

I well remember the Hermit who
Lived up in the public park,
He never ventured out of his cave
Til the sky and the fields were dark.
He was, ‘…the only Neanderthal
That survived the coming of Man!
Don’t get too near or you’ll rouse his fear
And he’ll chop off both your hands!’

The cave was deep and mysterious,
It hadn’t been there for long,
The entrance had been uncovered by
The blast of a German bomb,
As kids we’d run in the daylight sun
Right up to the entrance there,
And scream ‘Hello!’ in a long echo
When the other kids would ‘Dare.’

Then deep within came a rumbling
Like an Ogre, clearing its throat,
In seconds then we were tumbling
And I tore my best blue coat.
Just once we saw him out of the cave
With a beard, down to his waist,
Shaking his fist and grumbling
So we screamed, took off in haste.

The years went by and I asked my Dad,
‘Just who was that Hermit guy?
The one that you used to scare us with
In the public park, near Rye.’
He pursed his lips and his face was grim
‘Aye, that was a tale, my son,
Back in the war, a soldier there
And a ****** great Ack-ack gun!’

The Germans used to come every night
And the guns would open up,
With searchlights all criss-crossing the sky
We’d get no sleep or sup,
The guns would go, ‘Ack-ack, Ack-ack,’
Which is how they got their name,
The Home Guard took it in turns to shoot
Each time that the bombers came.’

‘Well Martin Shaw was an older man
And he shot a Heinkel down,
He stood and watched as it burst in flames
Then dived, and hit the ground.
But then a Dornier dropped a bomb
And it hit beside the gun,
It blew a hole in a cave below
Surprising everyone.’

‘The gun fell into the cave below
And so did Martin Shaw,
We said, ‘That’s it, poor Martin’s gone,
We won’t see him no more!’
But he survived in the cave below
And refused to come on out,
So when they were trying to rescue him
They were looking up the spout.’

‘The first one trying to come in here
Is going to lose his head!’
Martin screamed at the rescuers,
‘Come in, and you’ll be dead!’
He fired a couple of Ack-ack shells
To underline his case,
So they all backed off, and went to tea
And left the gun in place.’

‘The years went by and he stayed in there
Long after the war was done,
They knew that he didn’t have any more
Shells, for the Ack-ack gun,
So he’d only walk abroad at night
Catch rabbits and steal his veg,
They said he suffered from shell-shock
And was pretty near to the edge.’

My father had almost had me there
‘Til I saw his sneaky grin,
‘You’ve had me on again,’ I said,
‘You really suckered me in!’
He laughed, ‘I haven’t the faintest who
He was, but just a loon,
But there, that’s something to tell your kids
On a Sunday afternoon.’

David Lewis Paget

I once had a special friend at school,
His name was Daniel Hare,
He would dream through maths and geometry
For his mind was never there,
I would nudge him in the ribs each time
That the teacher turned to look,
And slide my hand across, to turn
To the right page, in his book.

He’d get this distant look in his eyes
And slump back into his seat,
And tell me then at the break, he’d been
In Ireland, digging peat,
He’d roam the great Canadian Plains,
Was there at Austerlitz,
And hid in a London cellar with
His mother during the Blitz.

The only subject he really loved
Was the study of history,
And then he’d sit on the edge of his seat
Enthralled at the mystery,
But Physics, Maths and Biology
He said, was leaving him cold,
He’d rather be there with Francis Drake
On a search for Spanish gold.

We went our separate ways, of course,
I didn’t see him for years,
Then came on him in a boarding house
Where he’d suffered some reverse,
His life, he said, was a shambles, he
Could never hold down a job,
His mind had continued to wander
From Berlin, and to Cape Cod.

His eyes were sunken, his skin was grey
I noted his sallow cheeks,
‘I dream too much in the day,’ he said,
‘And I just can’t get to sleep.’
I walked with him in a lonely cove
Where the moonlight shed its beams,
‘I need to find me a ship,’ he said,
‘And sail to the Port of Dreams.’

I asked him why he never had met
And married a local girl,
He said he’d met a girl in his dreams
But she didn’t live in the world.
‘She waits for me on the other side
Of a wide and windswept Bay,
Not in this life of broken dreams,
She leaves at the break of day.

A week went by and a storm came in,
He wasn’t there by the stove,
I made my way in the pouring rain
Where his footsteps led, to the cove,
I found him sat, his back to a rock
With a wild, unseeing stare,
And knew he’d gone to follow a dream
As the sea spray soaked him there.

For out in the bay a Barquentine
Had pitched and tossed in the storm,
A ghostly lantern hung from the mast
As the spars and the timbers groaned,
A figure clung to the foredeck yards
And waved as the wind had screamed,
While the barque turned west where the sun had set
And sailed for the Port of Dreams.

David Lewis Paget

I set out on a filthy evening
Jogged the stream and under the bridge,
Headed into the pouring rain
And over St. Alban’s Ridge,
I heard some footsteps running behind
But never could turn to see,
For who would venture out in the rain
Just to be following me?

I’d heard the following steps before,
Had stopped, and I’d turned around,
Scanned the bushes and hedgerows
There was no-one there to be found,
I thought I could hear some breathing
From a bush, or hid in a tree,
Though nothing stirred but a restless bird,
Nothing that I could see.

I’d always travelled the leaf strewn path
By the early sun of the day,
But sometimes ran when the darkness fell
By the light of a moonlight ray,
I loved the scent of the pine fresh air
It made me alive, and free,
It wasn’t until I courted Claire
That the footsteps followed me.

They’d stop whenever I stopped, and then
Would start again when I jogged,
I thought at first it was just a trick,
An echo, bounced off a log,
But sometimes, there in the silence when
I stopped while catching my breath,
I’d feel the hairs beginning to stir
Way up on the back of my neck.

I turned to run by a farmer’s field
That was stacked with new mown hay,
Reflecting light from the pale moonlight,
Awaiting the farmer’s dray,
I heard the footsteps behind me squelch
In the mud from the driving rain,
I called, ‘You’d better come out tonight,
By God, or I’ll cause you pain!’

I pulled a glittering knife blade out
I’d hidden, deep in its sheath,
Scanned the track by the farmer’s field
And the heather, down on the heath,
But nothing stirred in the pale moonlight
Though I saw its tracks in the mud,
And as I watched in a gathering fright,
They seemed to be filling with blood.

I turned and ran in a panic then
And weaved my way through the trees,
My heart was beating, my mind was numb
I slipped, and fell to my knees,
I finally found the giant oak
Where I knew that a corpse would lie,
The moon was sending a single beam
And lighting the dead man’s eye.

I’d propped him there when I’d slashed his throat
To free up the hand of Claire,
She’d been bereft when he disappeared,
Would never have found him there.
I’d meant to come back, bury the bones
But still he sat by the tree,
And now the footsteps joined with him there,
His eye was glaring at me.

They followed a trail of blood, they said,
The searchers said, when they came,
And I was cowering by the corpse,
They said that I was to blame.
They’ve put me here in a darkened cell
Where I sit and stare at the floor,
And hear the shuffle of footsteps there
On the other side of the door.

David Lewis Paget

‘Why do you stay by the window, Jill,
Why do you stand and stare?
There’s nothing to see but the sentinels,
The names of the dead out there.
There’s more to life than the cemetery
That ranges over the hill,
I’ll close the shutters and pull the blinds
If the sight disturbs you, Jill!’

She sighed and turned then, back to the room
But she wouldn’t meet my eye,
She’d been morose since the last full Moon
But wouldn’t be telling me why,
I thought it might be our child that bloomed
And blossomed under her gown,
But every time that I questioned her
She’d put me off with a frown.

She’d been along to the doctor’s, and
Since then, she hadn’t smiled,
I asked her, ‘What has he told you, then,
Is something wrong with the child?’
She shook her head and she told me, ‘No!’
But she wouldn’t meet my gaze,
She was always a terrible liar,
Women lie in a number of ways.

I caught her scribbling out her Will
On a parchment page, or two,
I said, ‘Why now?’ And she looked at me,
‘I needed something to do!
I thought it time that we wrote them out,
It wouldn’t hurt you as well,
We have to think of the baby now
As my belly begins to swell.’

I sat beside her and wrote it out
If only to calm her down,
She seemed so close to the edge of tears
That I wrote of the love we’d found,
And all I had would belong to her
Who’d saved me from the abyss,
She’d turned this drunken head around
And given a life of bliss.

She squeezed my hand as I signed my name
And the tears rolled down her cheeks,
Her hormones must have been pulling her down,
She’d be like this for weeks,
‘You’ll feel all right when the baby’s born,
We’ll sit in the sun, outside,
And get some colour into your cheeks,’
But Jill broke down, and cried.

A week went by, I was far from well
So she made me stay in bed,
‘I’m going down with a flu of sorts,
I feel so thick in the head.’
She brought me soup and she tended me
Like a mother hen with a chick,
She cried a lot and she lied a lot
While I lay there, feeling sick.

I staggered out of my bed one day
And stood, looked over the hill,
The snow had feathered the headstones white
I shivered there in the chill,
She came, was standing beside me, then
Reached down, and felt for my hand,
‘You know I’ll love you forever, Ben,
There won’t be another man.’

I looked at her in alarm, I thought
She might be going away,
‘What did the doctor diagnose
On that distant day, in May?’
‘I knew it would have to come to this,
He gave me results, it’s true,
Though not of the tests he did on me,
But the ones that he did on you!’

I write this on the side of the bed
For I find it hard to stand,
My heart is feeble, my body weak
With its cargo of contraband,
But still Jill stands by the window there
And she weeps, and bows her head,
I say, ‘Why stare at the sentinels,
Engraved with the names of the dead?’

David Lewis Paget

The news spread over the countryside
As a clatter from iron rails,
The ominous sound of clacketty-clack
From their intersecting trails,
The plodding Goods of the 0-4-0
To the proud Express from Cheam,
It muttered as it was going past,
‘They’re going to get rid of Steam!’

The sudden shock brought an answering hoot
From the stack of the proud Express,
That whispered by on its 4-6-2
But shuddered to draw its breath.
‘And what will they pull their Pullmans with?’
As it passed through an April shower,
A 4-6-0 on another track:
‘They’re moving to diesel power!’

The steam from the Earl of Erin laid
A trail through the valley floor,
Its coals glowed red from the firebox grid
As the fireman shovelled more,
A Day Excursion that quietly sat
To wait for the train to pass,
Had whispered, ‘Sorry to see you go,
You’re King of the Master Class.’

The smoke that billowed from out the stack
Had turned from white to black,
The footplate shuddered, the furnace roared
As it raced along the track,
‘They say they’re moving to diesel power
And they’re getting rid of steam,’
The Earl of Erin had hurtled by
As a Tank Engine had screamed!

The driver, checking the frantic pace
Was trying to slow it down,
But nothing worked, not even the brakes,
‘We’re headed for Hampton Town!
We shouldn’t be doing sixty-five
We’re twenty over the top,
He slammed the door of the firebox shut
And the fireman’s shovel dropped.

The tender’s couplings opened up
And the Pullmans fell away,
The Earl of Erin had surged ahead
With a new found power that day,
It passed a struggling 0-4-0
As it headed toward the sea,
Gave one long blast on its whistle then
To say, ‘I’m finally free!’

The fireman jumped at the water tower,
The glass was going down,
The driver jumped when it hurtled through
The Halt at Hampton Town,
The Earl of Erin went racing on
When the sea came into view,
But locked the brakes at the water’s edge
Just as the boiler blew.

The Earl of Erin’s a rusted wreck
That still sits there on the line,
And children crawl on its footplate there
And dream of another time,
A time of dragons, a time of trains
A time they can only dream,
The age of romance, gone at last,
It died with the age of steam!

David Lewis Paget

There’s a silence out in the fields tonight
Where the barley sheaves are stooked,
Their shadows stand in a menacing line
While the wives at home are spooked,
They peer from windows, they peer from doors
And they lock their shutters tight,
There isn’t a man in the valley’s span
For they didn’t come home tonight.

They left their cottages there at dawn
As the sun was on the rise,
Wandered out with their ploughman’s lunch
And rubbed the sleep from their eyes,
They carried their sickles across their backs
Their ******* hooks and their flails,
And who could read took a crumpled book
To read with a half of ale.

They bent their backs to the task ahead
Of reaping the sheaves of grain,
The clouds were billowing overhead
And they said, ‘It looks like rain!’
The sun went in and the sun came out
As the shadows flitted across,
They stooked the sheaves at an angle so
The rain would drain from the crops.

The rain held off ‘til the afternoon
When the men were streaked with sweat,
They sheltered under the Sycamores,
Laid down their tools in the wet,
The wives were busily cleaning homes,
Preparing the worker’s tea,
They didn’t look out to the barley field
‘Til the sun dipped into the sea.

They didn’t look, it was almost dusk
When they noticed something wrong,
The men would usually come back home,
They’d hear them, singing a song,
A silence settled upon the land
And the wives came out to stare,
But nothing moved in the barley field,
The men were just not there.

Their faces white in the pale moonlight
The wives sat still, and stared,
The stooks were seeming to move about
And the women, they were scared,
The stooks lined up in the barley field
Like a pack of hooded ghouls,
And lying right in the midst of them
Was a heap of reaping tools.

There’s a silence out in the fields tonight
Where the barley sheaves are stooked,
Their shadows stand in a menacing line
While the wives at home are spooked,
They peer from windows, they peer from doors
And they lock their shutters tight,
There isn’t a man in the valley’s span
For they didn’t come home tonight.

David Lewis Paget

She lived there still, in the house on the hill
Though she hadn’t been seen for years,
The Lady Margaret Hermanville
She’d lived in a mist of tears,
Her wedding day had been bright and gay
When her groom arrived at the door,
The devious Baron Wűrrtenberg
With his soldiers, back from the war.

The wedding service was short and sweet
Was held by a priest defrocked,
Was hurried through from the point of view
Of all that the Baron mocked,
He’d only wanted her dowry then
But claimed he wanted her hand,
And with it the House of Hermanville
With a thousand acres of land.

She’d gone alone to her wedding bed
While the Baron caroused ‘til dawn,
And lay awake with a constant ache,
What had she done, so wrong?
He made his quarters down with his men
While she languished up in her room,
But sought an audience then with him
On the following afternoon.

‘Where is the love you promised me
When you came and begged for my hand?
I may be wed but I’m now in dread
That you wanted me for my land!
Prove to me you’ve a noble heart
That there’s more to you than a gun,
And take your bride, for my barren womb
Should be stirring now with your son.’

The Baron laughed, and waved her away
‘It’s enough that you have my ring,
You have the title of Wűrrtenberg,
Of my heart, not even a thing.
I have a frau in Bavaria
Will be coming to live here soon,
So get you away to the Servants Hall,
You and your barren womb.’

The Lady Margaret stood in shock,
A tear had formed at her eye,
Her face as pale as the clouds that formed
Above on an azure sky,
‘I’ll go and petition the Cardinal,
I’ll have this wedding annulled.’
‘You’ll not be leaving this house again,’
He said, and her eyes had dulled.

A year went by and she sought some peace
Below in the Servants Hall,
While he went riding to fox and hounds
And didn’t see her at all,
His Gretchen came, to lord it above
At the feasts for his Men-at-Arms,
A flashy, rude, Bavarian trull
Who was loose with all of her charms.

The Baron watched her flirt with his men,
Grew angrier by the day,
He had her locked in an old sow’s pen
And sent all his men away,
He said, ‘You want to live like a pig
Then I’ll give you your heart’s desire,
He fed her truffles and day-old slop
And she slept on hay from the byre.

Back in the hall, he paced and paced
His echoing feet alone,
Began to think about Margaret
And thought that he might atone,
He heard the merriment down below
Drift up from the Servants Hall,
Went down the cavernous limestone steps
Where his wife was sat by the wall.

‘What’s this?’ he said, as he wandered in,
His wife was seven months gone,
The servants gathered around her there
And her face, it fairly shone.
‘You’ll never guess who the father is,
It could have been one of two,
You sent me off with a barren womb
But the only Barren is you!’

‘So pack your bags, you can leave us now,
You should have been more aware,
The deed of settlement that you signed
For my dowry said, ‘Beware!’
The house and land wouldn’t pass to you
But devolve to my first born son,
It could have been yours, but now, you see
It belongs to my little one.’

My mother never married again,
I’m lord of all I can see,
A thousand acres of farming land
My mother bequeathed to me,
I’ve watched her cry and I’ve watched her mourn
That I’m not the son of a Lord,
I’m proudly the son of a working man
With a mother that I adored!

David Lewis Paget

‘There’s something amiss with you today,
There’s something that isn’t right,
I heard you weep in your fitful sleep
As you tossed and turned all night,
We’ve been together for forty years
You’ve never been so distressed,
You’ve raised my fears with your silent tears
Why are you sad, my Blessed?’

‘A vision came to me overnight,
An angel with sparkling wings,
His face was glad, though he made me sad,
He said, ‘It’s the end of things!
The end of your careworn duties here,
The end of your struggle and strife,
The end of a long and loyal love
As a true and supportive wife.’’

‘Just what did he mean by that,’ I said,
As I felt my face turn white,
I grasped her hand like a drowning man
And I held her close, and tight.
‘Perhaps it was just a silly dream
Like the one that you had before,
The one about Michael, tapping, tapping
Tapping at our front door.’

‘Maybe it was,’ my wife had sighed
As she languished there in my arms,
‘But maybe again, he’d not have died
If I’d listened to his alarms.
He’d said that he hated swimming then,
And later I felt a fool,
The man at the door was tapping, tapping
To say he’d drowned in the pool.’

I felt the quiver of sadness then
That rattled through to the bone,
Our son was lost, and we paid the cost
In our small, but loving home.
She hadn’t wanted to look at me
For a year, or maybe two,
His picture flat on the mantelpiece
When she said, ‘He looked like you!’

I couldn’t deal with her sadness, for
My grief was hard to atone,
We walked like ghosts through an empty house
We both felt we were alone.
The years went by and our love revived
In a way that showed we cared,
The grief that came like a nightly thief
Was held, ****** down, and shared.

‘Perhaps it’s best that we let it go,
I feel so tired and wan,
I can’t remember the love we shared
Before our boy was gone.’
‘Your love was all that I wanted, Jen,’
My tears began to flow,
‘The angel’s name, it was Michael,
You’ll just have to let me go!’

David Lewis Paget

The children wanted a puppy dog
But I always told them no,
We only had an apartment, with
No place for it to grow,
They groaned and wailed ‘til the wife had paled,
‘You’ll have to shut them up!
They’re driving me stone crazy,
All they want is a tiny pup.’

‘It can’t be done, they make a mess
And they’re always underfoot,
I’ll get them something inanimate
From the net, I’ll look it up.’
I finally found a Russian site
Where they sold some crystal seed,
‘Try growing your own Dorazamite,
It’s the only pet you’ll need!’

I sent away for a starter kit
And it took a week to come,
A couple of packets of crystals
So I bought an aquarium,
The screed said ‘Just add water, then
Sit back to watch it grow,’
The kids weren’t very impressed, they said:
‘It seems to grow so slow!’

‘It takes a while,’ I began to smile,
‘But Rome wasn’t built in a day!’
‘We only wanted a puppy dog
To take outside, and play.’
It had started forming crystals, but
I gradually forgot,
And failed to check the aquarium,
Whether it grew, or not.

One day the kids were excited, said:
‘It’s starting to move about,
It ate the couple of skinks we found,
And keeps on getting out,
I found it down on the kitchen rug
In its blues and greens and golds,
But cut my hands when I picked it up,
Too sharp for me to hold.

A week went by and I heard them cry
‘It’s taken a lizard shape,
Has run right under the microwave,
It’s trying to escape.’
‘It’s only a pile of crystals, it
Can’t walk, or snap its jaws…’
‘It can,’ they said, when they went to bed,
‘It’s become a Dorazasaur!’

That night, the sounds of a tinkling had
Prevented me from sleep,
Like chandeliers in the wind, the sound
Was making my flesh creep,
The door burst open at three o’clock
With a jangling-wrangling roar,
And there was a glittering lizard, standing
There at the shattered door.

With a crystal eye, and four foot high
Its teeth were red, and sharp,
Its claws were very like amethysts
That tore at me in the dark,
It chased me out to the balcony
When I stood aside, it leapt,
Down to the concrete driveway
Where it shattered across the steps.

We live in a dangerous neighbourhood
Where we have to be on guard,
Where crystal birds, and crystal rats
Run out in your own backyard,
There are crystal dogs and crystal cats
That attack, and eat, and fight,
All from that lousy crystal pack
They called Dorazamite!

David Lewis Paget

The cabin had sat at the edge of the woods
Since Eighteen fifty-two,
It still belonged to our family,
So I guess that meant me too,
I found myself in need of a roof
And they hadn’t been there for years,
So I swallowed my pride, and hitched a ride
And forced the door with a curse.

It was down on the Tasman Peninsula
Was built by my fifth great-great,
He’d been picked up in a London mob
And suffered a convict fate,
He’d done his time with the cat ‘o nine
And had broken rocks for the road,
For seven years and a bucket of tears
He’d suffered the convict code.

His Ticket-of-Leave had set him free
So he’d headed into the woods,
Taken a common law wife with him
And a few of their paltry goods,
He’d cleared a section and cut the trees
For the cabin that sits in the grove,
And the one embellishment that he brought,
An American *** Belly Stove.

The stove still sat in the corner there
It hadn’t been lit for years,
I sat on the sagging miners couch
Gave way to a fit of tears,
The branches of trees had ventured in
The water was drawn from a well,
The door at the rear just hung and creaked,
I thought I’d arrived in hell.

I lit an age old paraffin lamp
That luckily still had fuel,
Searched my bag for a scrap to eat
But all that I had was gruel,
The sun went down and the dark set in
To the sounds of the wind outside,
Rustling through the tops of trees
And the leaves of the trees inside.

At midnight, I awoke with a start
To the sound of an evil roar,
More like a man than an animal
Standing at my front door,
I braced myself by the door, it roared
And then it began to pound,
‘What do you want?’ I screamed on out.
‘You’re sitting on hallowed ground!’

‘I want what’s properly mine,’ it said,
‘And then I’ll leave you alone.’
My teeth were chattering then, in fright
When it gave out another groan.
‘I’ll never rest ‘til I get it back,
I need it to make me whole,
A hundred years since they carved me up
I’ve waited to claim my soul!’

I looked across to the ancient stove
Where a mist was rising up,
A pale blue mist from the rusted flue
And I thought, ‘That’s it! Enough!’
The mist was taking a human shape
The shape of a surly man,
Wearing an age old Warder’s cap
But lacking a good right hand.

I crawled across to the iron stove
And I opened wide the door,
The bed was full of the clinker they
Had burned there, years before.
But buried deep in the ashes there
When I brushed aside the sand,
I saw a shape that had made me gape,
The bones of a human hand.

‘Is this the hand you are looking for?’
The thing gave out a groan,
‘Come out, and push it under the door,’
I heard the creature moan.
I did, then packed my bag and I burned
The cabin, deep in the grove,
I’ll never go near a house again
That has a *** Belly Stove!

David Lewis Paget

I met him first in a darkened room
Of the Club called Heaven’s Lair,
You wouldn’t look at him twice, in fact
You’d swear that he wasn’t there,
He’d sunk right into a corner lounge
And you’d think it rather odd,
He sat there facing the wall, and stared,
The Man with the Eyes of God.

I’d drank at the bar a dozen times
But I’d never seen him round,
A patron pointed him out to me
His lips not making a sound,
He turned a beer mat over, then
He nudged, and gave me the nod,
Scribbled a note that said, ‘That’s him!
The Man with the Eyes of God.’

I smirked, and carried my drink across
Though the patron said, ‘Beware!’
Approached the back of the lounge to see
When the man just said, ‘Stop there!
Don’t venture into my vision, or
You will see what you should not,
Your blood will curdle within your veins
And your heart will surely stop.’

I stopped, and sat to the rear of him
Behind, and off to his right,
‘They tell me you have a precious gift
To do with the Maker’s sight.’
‘It’s not a gift, it’s a curse,’ he said
‘That I’ve laboured with for years,
For God sent me for your history,
And lent me his eyes and ears.’

‘He wanted to know what you had done
Since he last went past this way,
And scattered the Tower of Babel by
Confusing your tongues that day,
He hadn’t wanted to interfere
For he gave you all free will,
So sent me as his emissary
To report both good and ill.’

‘And what have you told almighty God,
The truth, or a pack of lies?’
‘I haven’t needed to tell, he sees
The truth through both of his eyes,
I feel the sense of his discontent
At you breaking all his laws,
Polluting his beautiful planet
With the scourge of your endless wars.’

‘So what does he plan to do with us,’
I whispered there in the gloom,
‘Does he plan to come and punish us,
Will our God be calling soon?’
‘His spirit has always been right here,
It’s embedded in the earth,
In every tree and the mighty sea
In rain, and the gift of birth.’

‘You’ll feel the wrath of his discontent
In a thousand days of drought,
In ice that clings to your window-sills
In floods that you can’t keep out,’
He turned his head and he looked at me
And I cringed at his vacant nod,
For blood lay thick on each cheek, where he
Had put out the Eyes of God!

David Lewis Paget

I only wanted a quiet life
Was the first thought that I had,
When the woman beat on my cedar door,
I thought that she must be mad.
She beat and beat, and would not retreat
Though I begged her just to go,
But she cried, ‘He’s going to ****** me,
You must let me in, I know!’

I peered out through a crack in the door
Just to see the woman’s face,
Her lips were ******, her eye was black
And the tears had left their trace,
I groaned I wouldn’t become involved
But knew in the end I would,
I opened the door and let her in,
Her hands were covered in blood.

‘Don’t drip that blood on the carpet!’
She just turned to me with a shrug,
‘I’ve taken the carpet cleaner back
I borrowed to clean the rug!’
Too late, too late, as she smeared the blood
All over my pristine wall,
‘Are you callous or just plain crazy?
He’ll be coming to **** us all!’

‘Then why did you come to me,’ I cried,
‘There’s a hundred doors out there,
Go pick on another married fool
With a life lived in despair.
I never fell for the gender trap
For it always ends like this,
A bottle of Jack with a drunken lout
Who had promised married bliss.’

I steered her into the bathroom, ran
The taps as I heard him roar,
‘Come out you blanketty wilful witch
Or I’ll have to beat down the door!’
My cedar door with the frosted glass
That I only installed in June,
I heard a splinter, and then a crash
As he burst on into the room.

I pointed the shaft of the toilet brush
At him, from under a towel,
‘I’ve got a gun and I’ll use it!’ But
All that he did was howl.
A bullet whistled on past my head
And shattered the shower screen,
‘I swear I’ll blow you to Kingdom Come
If you don’t come now, Doreen!’

‘For God’s sake, give it a rest,’ she said,
As she washed the blood away,
Wiped her hands on my nice clean towel
As I groaned in my dismay,
He put the gun in his pocket, dropped
His head and began to weep,
‘Is this the guy you’ve been seeing then?’
‘What him? The guy is a creep!’

‘He’s more concerned with his carpet
Than a lady in distress,
I’d rather you with your ****** Toons
Though you tend to make a mess.’
She walked on up and she kissed him
And they walked out hand in hand,
‘Who’s going to pay for the damage, then?’
I called, but they had gone.

I never answer a beating door
No matter how long they knock,
I call out, ‘Sorry, I’m not at home,’
As I click the fifteenth lock,
A beaten wife is a world of strife
For the man who intervenes,
The bodies may pile outside my door
But I keep my carpets clean.

David Lewis Paget

Nightingale was a hunting lodge
At the time of Baron Blood,
He was holed up there for a month or so
While the Tamar was in flood,
His knights went after a suckling pig
That they brought back to the Hall,
‘We’d best be merry and feast, my Lord,
Or there’ll be no fun at all.’

The waters rose and it cut them off
By the monastery at Bede,
So they made to raid the Monk’s own stocks
And they carried back the mead,
The hounds lay panting around the hearth
And the knights caroused ‘til dawn,
But the waters of the Tamar lay
Close round them every morn.

A cottage lay on the old floodway
By the side of a river wharf,
The waters drove a yeoman out
And his wife, a pretty dwarf,
They made their way to the hunting lodge
And begged that they might come in,
‘I’m Olaf, you are my liege, my Lord
And my wife is Tamerlin.’

‘And what do you bring?’ said Baron Blood,
Who looked for a little sport,
‘We’re all entombed ‘til the waters fall,
‘So what do you bring to court?’
‘I’m simply a yeoman, with one hide
That’s drowned in the river mud,
Along with my only ploughshare…’
‘That’s a pity,’ said Baron Blood.

‘What of the geld you owe to me,
And how do you think you’ll pay?’
‘I throw myself on your mercy, Lord,
To pay you another day.
The river flooded the pasture, and
My crop lies under the mud,’
‘Perhaps your wife has a way to pay,’
Said the musing Baron Blood.

‘You’ll wait at table and serve the mead
And carve the suckling pig,
And feed the hounds at the hearth tonight
While your wife can show a leg,
We’ll have her dancing from dusk to dawn
Each knight can take his turn,
For Tamerlin pays your geld tonight
If she lasts from dusk ‘til dawn.’

Then Olaf looked at his Tamerlin
And he brushed away a tear,
But she looked bold at the Baron Blood,
‘I will stand the test, no fear!’
They helped to set up the feast that night
And they whispered soft and low,
‘If one should harm a hair of your head
I will ****, before I go!’

She put one finger up to her lips
And she whispered, ‘I’ll be true!
I’ll not be whirled off my feet by one
Who is half the man as you.’
She took a skewer and she stuck the pig
Right through to the other side,
‘I may be small but my heart is big
And I’m still your darling bride.’

The sun went down and the mead came out
As he went to feed the hounds,
The Baron called on a lute to play
From a doorway to the grounds,
Then Tamerlin had begun to dance
And sway as she said she would,
Her dress had swished on the earthen floor,
Out where the Baron stood.

The knights were steadily getting drunk
And the Baron stood and swayed,
‘Now hitch that dress to your waist,’ he said,
‘If you want your geld to be paid.’
She dropped her eyes and she blushed, and cried
But she lifted up her dress,
To show the legs that were short, deformed
And the Baron laughed, no less!

The Baron laughed and the knights had laughed
At the legs of Tamerlin,
She dropped the dress and she burst in tears
And she cried, ‘You’ve seen my sin!’
They didn’t ask her to dance again
But they drank until the morn,
Then fell about in a drunken swoon
As she lay apart, forlorn.

A silence fell as the sun came up
When she rose and took a skewer,
Walked to the sleeping Baron, and
She ****** it in his ear,
She ****** it in til it came on out
All blood on the other side,
‘You won’t be laughing again,’ she said,
‘Or shaming Olaf’s bride!’

They took a skewer to every knight
And they did the same to them,
In, and out at the other side,
A Hall of skewered men,
The waters, they were receding as
Her head, in pride upheld,
Remarked, ‘It’s time we were leaving,
We have truly paid the geld!’

Nightingale was a hunting lodge
That sank in a sea of mud,
You’d have to dig right down to find
The body of Baron Blood,
The woods grew up in the pasture fields
And covered the grisly tale,
Where lovers walk and will cease their talk
At the song of a Nightingale.

David Lewis Paget

The cottage stood at the outer edge
Of the village of Helsomewhere,
It held a slate on the garden gate
That scribbled a ‘Don’t Go There!’
It housed a cat and a resident bat
And something that moved within,
A thing unseen that was quite unclean
With various types of sin.

The folk that entered the garden gate
Had never gone back there twice,
When asked, they shuddered enough to state
‘It’s something that isn’t nice!’
The weeds were thick in the garden, and
Had grown right over the path,
And filled with sand by an old wash-stand
The remains of an iron bath.

Nobody walked the bullock track
That led by the old front door,
To go to town, they’d hurry around
A path that was there before,
The cottage stood like an ancient crone
That blighted the village scene,
A pointing finger, pared to the bone
Reminding them what had been.

At night the Moon rose over the ridge
And it cast an evil glow,
Down through the leaves of the eucalypts
To the cottage, far below,
The windows looked like a pair of eyes
As they stared out through the gloom,
While something was rushing around inside
Like a demon in a tomb.

‘Perhaps we ought to have burnt it,’
Said the senior councilman,
‘It stands alone as our conscience,’ said
The crusty old farmer, Stan,
‘We have to bleed for our own misdeeds,
Including a lack of care,
Each scream was seen as a nightmare dream
When Lloyd was living there.’

When Lloyd was hosting his dinners for
The girls from a nearby town,
Nobody seemed to question them
For Lloyd was always a clown,
But screams would happen at midnight
And would often be heard at dawn,
When Lloyd was digging his garden patch
By the light of the early morn.

And Lloyd would wave to his neighbours as
They hurried along his way,
Give them a cheery greeting, crack a joke
And say ‘Gidday!’
They didn’t suspect that evil lay
Inside in that old tin bath,
The one that is filled with sand, and now
Sits there, outside by the path.

One night the villagers crept on out,
And they took it each by turn,
To set a brand to the cottage, then
Stand back to watch it burn,
But something was rushing about inside
In a black and evil cloak,
While screams had seemed to come in a tide
With the dark and acrid smoke.

The embers were floating far and wide
In the haze of a Harvest Moon,
They set up fires in the eucalypts
That rained in the village gloom,
And every cottage went up in smoke
For the villagers’ part, they share
In the deaths of thirteen innocent girls
In the Hell of Helsomewhere!

David Lewis Paget

‘You’ve come to the end, it’s sad, my friend
But there’s nothing more we can do,
Your kidneys have malfunctioned, and
You’re at the end of the queue.
You’d best be making your Will out now
Or you may run out of time,
There’s just a question of fifteen thou’
You owe for our work, just sign!’

‘I’ll not be signing my life away
Just now, though it’s almost done,
I may be taking a walk someday
But not ‘til I’ve had some fun.
You say I’ve only a week or two
To spend, and that’s at the best,
I’ll cram the rest of my living in
With the help of a Prescient Vest.’

The Prescient Vest, the brainchild of
A Silicone Valley clone,
It calculated the path of life
From the life already known,
It fed its images through a brain
That would never live to see
The normal span of the life of man
Through some abnormality.

So Kevin fronted the Institute
And was strapped into a chair,
Fitted with Vest and Headpiece
And was virtually aware,
It drained the memories of his life
That flashed on past his sight,
And stored them into a tiny file
Just less than a Gigabyte.

And then it started to calculate
Beginning with his wife,
It showed her having a sweet affair
With the boarder, Stanley Smythe,
They both attended his funeral
And she leant upon his arm,
And held the wake with a Currant cake
At Stanley’s father’s farm.

Then Kevin struggled within his bonds
And tried to say, ‘Not true!’
But then his favourite daughter came
Quite suddenly into view,
She stole the funeral money he’d
Been keeping in a jar,
Then jumped on into his Thunderbird
And drove off with his car.

She let her idiot boyfriend in
To sit behind the wheel,
But all he could see were dollar signs
And a car he’d like to steal,
He dropped her off at a candy shop
Drove off and left his Pam,
While only a half a mile away
He ended under a tram.

Kevin suffered a minor fit
At the wreck of his pride and joy,
But didn’t suffer a single qualm
At the death of the stupid boy,
His job had gone to a minor clerk,
Dumped records in the bin,
The careful working of twenty years
That he’d spent compiling them.

Then Stanley got at his savings and
He frittered them away,
His wife was clueless, she let him sell
The house he’d slaved to pay,
The future, once he had gone was not
The thing he’d visualised,
He strained and screamed at the Techs,
‘Just get this thing from off my eyes!’

He staggered home in a mood and took
Some gas from out the car,
Splashed it around the house, and took
The cash from the funeral jar,
He threw a match and it all went up
Though he didn’t know or care,
That his wife and Stan were up above
When the flames went up the stair.

He jumped on into the Thunderbird
And went for a long, last ride,
Along the Beachside Boulevard,
And once he had stopped, he died!
They’ve banned the use of the Prescient Vest
With a raft of bills and laws,
‘The future needs to be locked,’ they said,
‘For the damage it might cause!’

David Lewis Paget

‘The world has left me behind,’ he said,
‘I live my life in the past,
None of the things that I came to love
Survived, they just couldn’t last.
The rails that I rode are overgrown,
The music I loved has gone,
The friends that I made are left in the shade,
Though most of them travelled on.’

The woman who’d answered his ad was sat
Beside him out on the porch,
She’d heard this tale a million times
So she never carried a torch.
She bent her head as she listened to him
And she smiled, her hair was grey,
The years of care were visible there
As her beauty faded away.

‘But wasn’t it all a wonderful ride,’
She sighed, as she thought of him,
The man who’d always been at her side
‘Til he died, his end was grim.
But that was a dozen years ago
And life carried on, though sad,
She wanted to meet a gentle soul
Which was why she’d answered the ad.

‘Why would you want to live in the past
When the past is done and gone,
I tip my hat to the past,’ she said,
‘But the future lures me on.
There’s conversation and love to share
As long as there’s life and breath,
The future’s only a day away,
The end of it all is death.’

He sat up straight and he stared at her
Transfixed by her gentle voice,
The things that stirred in his hardened heart
He’d buried them there by choice.
Behind her eyes was an inner glow
That he hadn’t noticed before,
‘Could you really bring me to life again?’
He said, and his voice was raw.

‘We can take it just one step at a time,’
She said, ‘as we did when young,
The world was such a marvellous place
To explore, like a song unsung,
We’ll bless the sun coming up each day,
To spread its light through our land…’
Then watched the roll of a single tear
As she reached on out for his hand.

David Lewis Paget

The thunder was rumbling overhead
As we walked toward the church,
I whispered, ‘What are you doing, girl,
Are you leaving me in the lurch?’
She looked so fine in her wedding dress
But her face was set in a frown,
‘You had your chance,’ she gave me a glance,
‘You’re always letting me down.’

I wasn’t supposed to be there so
Her father gave me a nudge,
‘Sit at the back if you really must!’
He’d always carried a grudge.
‘I couldn’t sit by to see her tie
Herself to that freak, d’you hear?’
‘Just make a sound and I’ll knock you down
And throw you out on your ear!’

I looked at the six foot three of him
And knew he meant what he said,
But I couldn’t part from Josephine
In truth, I’d rather be dead,
The thunder rumbled and lightning cracked
Exploded the Wishing Tree,
Dropped it across the Vestry path
As if it was meant for me.

The tree had blocked us off from the Church
As the rain came pelting down,
Josephine raised the front of her skirt
And screamed, ‘We’re going to drown!’
We turned and ran way back to the car
But they locked me out in the rain,
And Josephine turned her eyes away
For my face was racked with pain.

My clothes were sodden, my hair was drenched
As I wondered what to do,
‘What can I say to change your mind,
To prove my love for you?’
She wound the window a tiny way,
Said, ‘This is a practice run,
The wedding’s not until Saturday,
And by God, you’d better come!’

She’d planned it all and had set me up,
Her father sat and grinned,
‘I’ll be along with a shotgun, so
You’d better be there, my friend!’
I danced out there in my soaking suit
As the rain streamed down my face,
The ‘freak’ was simply a cousin of hers
I’d thought was taking my place.

She told me we were having a son
Just after I said, ‘I do!’
I said, ‘Well aren’t you the sneaky one,
Why didn’t you tell me? True!’
She waited ‘til the reception, then
She really took me to task,
I asked her, ‘What of the practice run?’
‘I thought that you’d never ask!’

David Lewis Paget

My brother was twelve years older so
I knew him not so well,
But heard of him in the taverns,
Getting drunk, and raising hell,
My mother said, ‘Keep away from him,’
And I did, for many years,
But blood is blood, and a brother should
Help out, though it ends in tears.

He’d done a spot of embezzling,
He’d picked the pockets of Earls,
You never left him to tend a horse
And he wasn’t safe with girls,
But he was my brother Toby,
And I was his brother Tim,
I’d often find him beneath my bed
When he said, ‘Don’t let them in!’

By ‘them’ he had meant the Runners
Who were active in the Bow,
And some of the old Thief-Takers
With their ruffians in tow,
They roamed the streets with their cudgels
And would lie, just out of sight,
Beyond the doors of the Taverns, when
They turned them adrift at night.

The streets were mean, and were far from clean
Where my brother used to roam,
Despite the pleas of our mother, who
Would beg him to come back home,
But father remained unbending, said
His eldest son was a swine,
‘His endless scrapes, a Jackanapes!
He is no son of mine!’

I heard he’d taken a horse and fled
From a stables in the Strand,
‘There’s little that anyone now can do,
When they catch him, he’ll be hanged!’
My mother, crying a flood of tears
As my father cursed and swore,
‘I’ll call the Runners, or I’ll be ******
If you let him through my door!’

So Toby galloped to Hounslow Heath
Along the Great West Road,
Teamed up with the brute Tom Wilmot,
Lay low in his abode,
They’d venture out on a moonlit night
To wait for the latest Stage,
But Tom was never the gentleman,
Or known to contain his rage.

They stopped the coach on a lonely night
‘Your money or your life!’
Dragged out a country gentleman,
His maid, and his homely wife,
He wanted the ring on the lady’s hand
But her finger held it tight,
So he sawed the finger off as well
With a sharp, serrated knife.

‘It was terrible,’ Toby told me
As they loaded him onto the cart,
‘The screams and the blood, unholy,’
As the horse was about to depart,
They hung him high on the Tyburn Tree
Next to the Wilmot pig,
Not undeserved, but I cried and cursed
As he danced the Tyburn jig.

David Lewis Paget

The cards had been falling badly for
The man that they knew as Jack,
He’d entered through the scullery door
In a faded, stained old Mac,
He didn’t look like he had a buck
Til he reached into his coat,
And pulled a roll of hundreds out
That would choke a Nanny Goat.

They said he could play a hundred down
And a hundred for each raise,
It didn’t appear to faze him then,
He said, ‘Well, loser pays!’
He fooled them all with his poker face
And he bluffed at first to win,
But by the time that the clock struck eight
His roll was getting thin.

When Diamond Jim played a Royal Flush
And took his final note,
Jack stood up and he shook his head
And reached out for his coat,
‘I thought that you’d try to win it back,
You must have more to spare,
I’ll wager it all for what you’ve got
In your pocket, double dare!’

Jack then sat, and his eyes had glowed
As he scowled at Diamond Jim,
Pulled out a tarnished silver coin
And he said, ‘Well let’s begin!’
They eyed the coin on the table-top
Its head like a man with horns,
‘You can’t look now at the tails of it
Til you own it, then it’s yours.’

‘What would you say that coin is worth,
I’ve never seen its like.’
‘There isn’t enough in all the earth
To purchase it, by right,
It must be won in a game of chance
As I won it, long ago,
From a man like a Turkish Sultan that
I met in a travelling show.

Diamond Jim dealt a single hand
And he said, ‘What if I win?’
‘Then you can look at the coin’s reverse
And the chaos will begin!’
‘I think that you’d better show me now
Before we play this hand,
I’m not so sure that I want this coin
With its evil Goats Head Man.

Jack reached out and he tossed the coin
Which spun for a while up there,
As each man suddenly felt the pain
Of a deep and a dark despair,
It took forever to clatter down
And rest on the table top,
The sign of a Spider facing up,
They thought that their hearts would stop.

For up from the coin the spirits came
Of the ones that they’d loved and lost,
And all of them seemed to be in pain
As the wailing came across,
They lurched away from the table, and
They stood and they shook in fear,
‘By God, there’s Marilyn Ampersand
Who drowned in June last year.’

The walls of the room then fell away
They stood on a stony beach,
A woman was drowning out in the surf
But totally out of reach,
And Diamond Jim gave an awful cry
From the depths of his shattered soul,
‘I’d give the world as a ransom, dear,
To bring you back safe, and whole.’

Then Jack had snatched at the tarnished coin
And flipped it up on its head,
The room returned, they were standing there,
‘You can bring her back from the dead!
You only have to possess the coin
Are you willing to play the hand?’
But Jim had wiped at his fevered brow
And shook, he could barely stand.

He took his winnings, all in a roll
And he pushed them back at Jack,
‘Just take your coin and your money too
And leave, don’t ever come back!
I like my world as it is, my friend,
Though grief lies deep in the groin,
But Marilyn won’t be coming back
From the other side of the coin!’

David Lewis Paget

The farm at Little Rottingdeane
Lay fallow for a year,
Since Cromwell’s Ironsides had spent
The winter, quartered there,
They’d emptied out the pantry, killed
The cattle, stripped the barn,
And ***** the little milking maid
Before they left the farm.

The farmer, Rodger Micklewaite
Lay in his bed all day,
Too sick to raise his farmer’s head,
Too ill to bale the hay,
His wife took on the milking of
The milker they had left,
And comforted the milking maid
Who cried, as one bereft.

‘The master should be well again,
By early May or June,’
The wife had muttered tearfully
While gazing at the Moon,
But soon a pair of pigeons took
Their places in the loft,
‘Lord help us, it’s a sign of doom
To curse our little croft.’

The pigeons had been there before
When folk had fallen ill,
And when they came, it fell the same
For death would spread its chill,
And Rodger died, when they appeared
There was no time for grief,
A man called Palm soon bought the farm
To give them some relief.

The milking maid, her belly swelled
Betook her to her bed,
A tiny room that lay in gloom
Beside the milking shed,
She cried and cursed the Ironside
That set her on this course,
‘May Satan put a thorn beneath
The saddle of his horse.’

The babe was born by All Saints morn
She’d screamed to see its face,
The head shaped like a helmet or
Some bony carapace,
She only could discern its mouth
With teeth sharp, and ill-formed,
‘I cannot nurse this ugly waif,
I’ve bred the Devil’s spawn!’

Then Palm screeched at the sight of it,
Was sick unto his soul,
‘I never should have bought this croft
Or housed this Satan’s troll!’
The widow made his sickness bed
And counted him as lost,
For pigeons two came into view
And settled in the loft.

Then Palm began to waste away,
She fed him beer and broth,
He died upon the seventh day,
Was buried in the croft,
But then a troop of Ironsides
Rode through there from the moors,
And one of them remained behind
To tend his fevered horse.

‘What ails your horse,’ the widow said,
The trooper growled with scorn,
‘Some fool that saddled up my horse
Slid under it, a thorn.’
The milking maid, recovered then
And ****** into his face,
The baby, wrapped in lace and shawl
To hide its carapace.

‘You left a trace of you behind
When last you passed through here,’
The trooper blanched to see its face
Then shook in mortal fear,
The hungry babe went for his throat
And bit with all its might,
As blood streamed from the Ironside
To drown the Devil’s mite.

Two pigeons flew into the loft
Just as the trooper fell,
It only took a minute for
His soul to wake in hell,
The widow and the milking maid
Packed up and left that night,
‘This time, we’re like two pigeons,’
Said the widow, ‘taking flight!’

David Lewis Paget

He put a flint to the lantern once
They’d walked across the crest,
Were lost in a group of headstones that
Lay hidden from the rest,
And down in a slight depression he
Lit up a certain tomb,
Where the name of Elspeth Trelawney
Was reflected in the gloom.

Trelawney held up the lantern high
While Corby held the *****,
And Gordon Bracks with an old pick-axe
Stood back, he was afraid.
‘I fear the spirits are out tonight
In this graveyard of the ******!’
‘Get on, and turn up the sod,’ he said,
Trelawney forced his hand.

The Squire was quiet and ashen-faced
As the two had bent their backs,
Corby tipping the earth aside
Then standing aside for Bracks,
‘The earth is solid, it’s packed right down,
We need to pick it loose,’
‘Just do whatever you have to do,
There’s little time to lose!’

The Squire had buried his Elspeth back
In eighteen twenty-four,
For seven years he had held his grief
But he couldn’t take much more,
‘I have to see her again,’ he said,
To kiss her pale, dead lips,
To stroke the hair on my darling’s head
And caress her fingertips.’

She’d taken the coach and four one day
Way out in the countryside,
The coachman, used to a horse and dray,
Had begun to speed the ride,
He whipped the horses and lost the reins
As the coach began to slide,
Tipped the coach in the watercourse
Where Elspeth drowned and died.

He hadn’t looked at his lover’s face
Before she was interred,
But tried to avoid the loss of grace
In her face that was inferred.
‘I only want to remember her
As she was in the flush of life,
Not in the throes of death,’ he’d said
When talking about his wife.

They’d rushed to hurry the burial,
On the day that she was found,
Popped her into a coffin, then,
Planted her in the ground,
Trelawney later had agonised
That he hadn’t let her lie,
‘I couldn’t bear her to be around,’
He said, with a tearful eye.

But now he wanted to see her face,
They lifted the coffin lid,
While Gordon Bracks had turned his back
To see what Trelawney did,
The horror showed on the Squire’s face
As he gazed into her eyes,
For Elspeth lay in a bleak dismay
As her fate was realized.

Her hands were raised and they looked like claws
They’d scratched at the coffin lid,
The clumps of hair she had torn right out
Was the final thing she did,
And on the lid she had scratched his name
In the torment of the ******,
‘Trelawney, may you be cursed by God!’
She’d scratched, with her dying hand.

David Lewis Paget

The Starship Galaxy III came in
To land in a farmer’s field,
There wasn’t much of a barley crop
For the seed had failed to yield,
The city lay just a mile away
In a glow of flashing lights,
‘I wonder how they manage to sleep,’
Said the Captain, Arzen Kytes.

They’d travelled across the universe
In a push through hyper space,
For seven years at the speed of light
In a bid to seek and trace,
They’d followed the trail of radio waves
From near to a distant sun,
And ended up in the Milky Way
Where the sounds were coming from.

‘There has to be life out there,’ they’d said,
‘We’re surely not alone,
We’ll send a mission to check them out,
To see what they’re like at home,
They must have a crude technology
To be able to transmit,’
And now in sight of the city lights
They were on the verge of it.

‘There’s oxygen in the air out there,
It’s much the same as home,
It’s safe to send out a party in
The seven seater drone,
So under the Captain, Arzen Kytes
They flew to a city square,
But the skyscrapers were neglected
And the weeds were thick out there.

They roamed through many department stores
Now empty of displays,
And passed by stores that were boarded up,
‘This town’s seen better days!’
Nobody walked the city streets
And the Captain shook his head,
‘Whatever happened to bring them down,
It looks like they’re all dead!’

But then in an old computer shop
They saw a sign of life,
A dozen or so of bobbing heads,
An old man and his wife,
But nobody said a single word
Or looked when they came in,
But kept on pushing the buttons of
Some tool that glowed within.

The old man opened his mouth and spoke,
‘You’re not from round these parts.
I saw the flivver you just flew in,
We’re back to the horse and cart.
This generation is not so bright,
They don’t know how to speak,
The gift of language has passed them by
Now all that they do is tweet.’

‘When most of the population died
With famine, came disease,
The crops were genetically modified
And killed off all the bees,
So nothing is pollinated now
But the bit we do by hand,
It wasn’t enough to save the world
From the greed that ruined the land.’

‘But what about all the city lights,
They’re flashing still, in truth!’
‘Everything came with flashing lights
To hypnotise our youth.
We may get help from a distant star
If they see them flash in space,
But once the power goes off, we’ll see
The end of the human race.’

The Captain of the Galaxy III
Flew back to board his ship,
When questioned by the rest of the crew
He frowned, and bit his lip,
‘There’s signs of a civilisation here
But they’ve let it go to seed,’
And smiled at the gentle irony,
‘The fools gave in to greed!’

David Lewis Paget

She was always essentially evil with
Her long, straight raven hair,
Her eyes as black as a midden, and
Her cheeks, so smooth and fair,
Her lips were ripe with the juice of love
Though she had no love to give,
But coloured them with a hint of blood
From her last aperitif.

She lived in an ice-bound castle, pitched
Next to a frozen lake,
Under a towering mountainside
As white as her wedding cake,
The clouds that hung on the mountain top
Were dark and as foul as sin,
And every day was a shade of grey
Where the sun could never get in.

She wandered the dark and gloomy halls
In a fur, but shivered her bones,
Her footsteps echoing off the walls
Her shadow cast on the stones,
The braziers on the passage wall
Would light her way to a room,
The room where a magic mirror hung
Reflected her in the gloom.

The hearth held a blazing yew tree log
That never seemed to go out,
Apart from a sneaking graveyard dog
There was nobody else about,
She’d stand in front of the mirror there
And look at her hard, cold face,
Say, ‘Mirror, when will you let me be,
I need to get out of this place!’

The face in the mirror grimly smiled
With a look of evil intent,
‘Why don’t you visit the dungeons, dear,
You know you need to repent.’
She tossed her head at the steely gaze
As her conscience peered on back,
‘I only did what I had to do
To replenish the blood I lack.’

The woman back in the mirror snarled
And she grew long pointed fangs,
Her brow had darkened, her eyes were fierce
‘We reflect our rights and wrongs.
The darkness deep in your cold, cold heart
Has entrapped this place in ice,
Compared to what lies ahead of you,
This place is Paradise.’

The woman turned and began to sob
And she paced the flagstoned floor,
There wasn’t a hint of the word ‘Repent’
As she opened the passage door,
She ran down several flights of steps
To the dungeon underneath,
Then stood and glared through the rusted bars
At her husband, Gordon Reith.

But Gordon sat on the ice cold floor
His back to an icy wall,
The frost had set on his face and hands
He wasn’t moving at all,
The puncture marks on his neck were red
With the last of his lifeblood flows,
She’d screamed the moment she’d found him dead
And ripped and torn at her clothes.

And that was the day the blizzard came
To freeze the lake in the night,
Covered the castle and mountain top
In an endless coat of white,
The mirror showed her an evil face
In place of the one she had,
‘You’ll not be drinking his blood again,
The blood of a corpse is bad!’

She opened the lock of the dungeon door
And she walked right into the cage,
Shook his body and gouged his face
In a wild, impotent rage,
The door had creaked as she turned her back
And it slammed and locked for good,
As the mirror fell from the wall above
And shattered where she’d stood.

A castle sits in a valley green
And beside a wide blue lake,
With mountains towering up above
To a sky where the sun’s awake,
You wouldn’t know that there once was snow
And I don’t know if you should,
But down in the dungeon lies a man
And the woman who drank his blood.

David Lewis Paget

Elijah worked at the further end
Of the Port McDonald pier,
His job was simply to keep the light
Bright burning through the year,
All he’d see were the seagulls who
Would swoop and dive in the spray,
As the sea beat up on the jetty piles
On a cold, dark winter’s day.

His mother had died of a broken heart
Long after his father fled,
Had loosed the chains of his fatherhood
For a life on the sea instead,
They’d put him into an orphanage
Where he learned to abide the rod,
And found that his supplications and
His prayers fell short of God.

The universe was an empty space,
A vast, unseeing sky,
There wasn’t a presence watching him
As they’d said, in the days gone by,
He ached for a revelation that
Would show he was not alone,
A single soul in the firmament
In front of an empty throne.

He’d never managed to make a friend
In the long, sad years of life,
And women, though they avoided him
He longed for a sweet young wife,
His isolation was made complete
When he walked back to his room,
After a night on the lonely pier
In the early morning gloom.

One night a waif from the city streets
Sought shelter from the storm,
Huddled against the cabin wall
Where he sat, both safe and warm,
He heard her shuffle and took her in
And gave her tea from the urn,
And fell in love with her sad, grey eyes,
A waif from the city, spurned.

She came again, and again each night,
They talked until the dawn,
And weaved their dreams and their fantasies
Of a world they’d neither known,
But then one night the Inspector came,
A grim, ungiving man,
Who frowned, and he told the girl to leave,
He said that she was banned.

She waited, shivering in the cold
In the lee of the old sea wall,
Til he came hurrying from his shift
As the dawn spread over all,
He wrapped her up in his coat, and cried
He could do no more than this,
But she clung on to his lonely form
And she gave him his first kiss.

He took her back to his room to stay
And he watched her as she slept,
If she had opened her eyes that day
She would see Elijah wept,
‘I won’t go back to those lonely nights,’
Was the thought that gripped his mind,
To lose his midnight companion now
He thought, was most unkind.

That night, he told her to meet him there
At the far end of the pier,
‘Just as the clock strikes one!’ She said,
‘I’ll be there, never fear.’
He’d soaked the pier in kerosene
Just twenty yards from the end,
And when she arrived, he said, ‘You’ll see,
They won’t part us, my friend.’

At two in the morning, up it went
In a blaze of fire and smoke,
The centre part of the pier ablaze
As they watched it, neither spoke,
A gap appeared as it all fell in
Was extinguished by the sea,
But the end stood tall like a sailing ship
That had set the couple free.

The storm that ravaged the coast that night
Kept the lifeboat on the shore,
They wanted to go and rescue him,
The Inspector said, ‘What for?’
While they looked out at the raging sea
Made plans for the world they’d won,
And when the light of the dawn approached
The end of the pier had gone.

David Lewis Paget

I got the call at eleven o’clock,
‘They want you to dig a grave!’
It wasn’t such a terrible shock,
The message came by a knave.
A serving man from the House of Gull,
That mansion up on the hill,
Where Baron Downz kept his hunting hounds
And the beautiful Grace de Ville.

They often sent me a midnight call
To dig them a grave or two,
Whenever there was a duel fought,
For graves, well, that’s what I do!
I dig them deep in the dead of night
At the edge of the Forest Clare,
They pay me a hundred and fifty crowns
You wouldn’t know they were there.

For only I know the resting place
Of the Lords that fell by his sword,
Of every man that has tried his will
Each one that questioned his word.
The Baron’s known for his ****** mind
And revenge is his only skill,
He gets them drunk on his German wine
And then moves in for the ****.

He murdered the father of Grace de Ville
Then kept her there as his prize,
The night that he tried to have his will
She almost scratched out his eyes,
He keeps her bound by a silver chain
With a lock that tethers her wrist,
And swears she’ll only be free again
When her maidenhead is his.

The servants told me he paced the hall
With his patience growing thin,
He’d rage and roar when she locked the door
To prevent him getting in,
There was tumult up in the hall that night
So I knew that there may be blood,
I took my shovel and lantern out
And began to dig by the wood.

At three o’clock in the morning they
Arrived in the horse-drawn hearse,
Slid a coffin out of the back
And laid it down on the turf.
The Baron Downz rode his horse around
And peered in the empty grave,
‘A fitting place for the maidenhead
Milady’s so keen to save!’

I felt the chill running up my spine,
It raised the hairs on my neck,
Surely he couldn’t be so unkind,
But the coffin lay on the deck,
The Baron motioned them all away
And they left with the coal black hearse,
He watched me lower the coffin in
Then turned away with a curse.

‘Be sure to cover that coffin well,’
He snarled as he turned to go,
Tossed me a hundred and fifty crowns
Then ambled off, real slow.
I heard a thump in the coffin then
And my heart jumped into my throat,
A muffled whimper, down in the ground
And a scream on a rising note.

I knew my life would hang by a thread
If the Baron came back around,
But still I thought, I’d rather be dead
Than bury de Ville in the ground.
I clambered into that terrible grave
And prised off the coffin lid,
She gasped, and thanked the lord she was saved,
But then came a note of dread.

‘You play me false, you’ll pay with your life,’
The Baron stood looking down,
And then he began to unsheathe his sword,
The shovel was still in the ground,
I turned the shovel blade side up
And ****** it under his chin
We clambered out of that open grave
And swiftly tumbled him in.

I work for the Lady Grace de Ville
In her livery, red and gold,
I’ve not been asked for a single grave,
Nor ever will be, I’m told,
I take her out in the coach and four
To ride by the Forest Clare,
And run right over the Baron’s grave
Whenever we’re passing there.

David Lewis Paget

I’d only woken an hour before
And it seemed to cause a stir,
With people pouring into the room,
Coming from everywhere,
They looked excited, stared at me
And I stared right back, confused,
But nobody said a word to me
And I started feeling used.

‘What the hell…’ I began to say,
But a nurse told me to hush,
Stuck a thermometer into my mouth
Then tried to feed me mush,
She cleared the room and a doctor came
And read my chart with a frown,
‘Welcome back to the world,’ he said,
‘It’s changed, since you were around.’

I couldn’t make head or tail of this,
I didn’t know where I was,
Loaded with tubes, I raised my arms
And flapped like an albatross,
‘Let me get out of here,’ I said,
‘I need to get up and walk!’
‘Your legs won’t carry you anywhere
Just yet, but we have to talk.’

He said I’d been out a long, long time,
It would take more time to adjust,
To start, he asked if I knew my name
So I told him, Benjamin Rust.
And then I remembered the bicycle
That I’d ridden down to the shop,
And the four wheel drive that had sped right by,
Too bad that it didn’t stop!

Then slowly figures came back to me,
A head full of raven hair,
Those pouting lips that had tempted me
And a dimple or two to spare,
She’d arched her brows in a quizzical way
When I’d shown her the double bed,
Then laughed, ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself,
I first need a ring,’ she said.

We’d courted all through the summer months
And made love late in the fall,
I’d said, ‘I don’t want a part of you,
I’d be content with it all!’
We wed in a little country church
Where the rain dripped down from the eaves,
And strolled from the vestry, hand in hand
As a breeze had fluttered the leaves.

My heart had leapt in that sterile room
As I caught the scent of her hair,
I said, ‘Is Jocelyn waiting here?’
The doctor continued to stare.
‘You have to know that your world has changed
And the change may bring you tears,
You haven’t been out for a week or so,
But over a number of years.’

I was feeling the panic rise in me
As those dreaded words sank in,
‘Over a number of years,’ he’d said,
As if I’d committed a sin!
And then, ‘How old do you think you are?’
I replied, ‘I’m twenty-two!’
He shook his head at the foot of the bed,
‘There’s a shock still coming to you.’

He wouldn’t say, and he went away
As I lay there, feeling grim,
So I asked the nurse, ‘How old am I?’
But she said, ‘Just wait for him.’
At three in the afternoon I sensed
A shadow, stood at the door,
And there was a matronly woman there
Who must have been fifty-four.

She said, ‘I can’t believe you’re awake,
We’d long given up on you,
They asked me to come to the hospital,
And I needed to see, it’s true.’
Her hair was grey, but she had a way
That dredged a dream from the past,
She said, ‘Do you know me, Jocelyn?
It’s good to see you at last.’

The horror rose in my throat at that,
My heart hung still in my chest,
‘My God, you look like your mother now…’
‘I knew that you’d be distressed.
I got a divorce when you didn’t wake
After ten long years in this bed,
I feel so sad, but I wed again…’
Her words, like knives in my head.

I’d lain in a coma, thirty years
Why didn’t they let me die?
Jocelyn said she paid for me
In hopes, she didn’t say why.
This world is a terrifying place
When you lose the love of your life,
And wake to the loss of thirty years…
I’ll slit my veins with a knife!

David Lewis Paget

I was travelling through the country
That was once East Turkestan,
Keeping my western mouth shut in
The province, Xinjiang,
I wasn’t going to linger there,
I had planned to head due east,
And follow the Western Wall to where
They spoke my Shanghainese.

They spoke a myriad dialects
All over Xinjiang,
There must have been forty languages,
And I didn’t know but one,
I had to get by with signing ‘til
I wandered in through the trees,
Into a tiny village where
A man spoke Shanghainese.

He stood in front of a tiny shop
That was selling drink and dates,
And something evil that looked like worms
All white, and served on a plate,
He said, ‘Ni Hao’, and ushered me in
And I took what I could get,
Shut my eyes and shovelled it in,
I can taste the foul stuff yet.

But there in the back of the tiny shop
Were a host of curios,
Most of them antique statuettes
The sort that the tourists chose,
But up on a shelf, I saw a lamp
Covered in grease and dust,
I said, ‘How much do you want for it?’
‘More than your soul, I trust!’

I said, ‘It looks like Aladdin’s Lamp,
But that was the Middle East!’
He shook his head and he said to me,
‘Aladdin was Chinese!
His palace used to be over there,’
And he pointed out to a mound,
A hill of rubble and pottery shards
That covered a hectare round.

He said he’d fossicked the ancient mound
And found all sorts of things,
Cups and plates and statuettes
And even golden rings,
But the thing he found that intrigued him most
Was the finding of that lamp,
He’d dug it out of a cellar there
That was cold, and dark, and damp.

And there by the lamp was an ancient scroll
With instructions in Chinese,
‘Don’t rub the lamp for a trivial thought
For the Djinn will not be pleased,
There are seven and seventy wishes here
Then the Djinn’s released from the spell,
But if you should wish the seventy-eighth
Then you’ll find yourself in hell!’

‘So how many wishes have now been wished,’
But the old man shook his head,
‘If I knew that, would I still be here,
I would rather this, than dead.’
He said that he’d been afraid to wish
For the lamp was ancient then,
Had passed through many since it was new,
Back in Aladdin’s den.

I offered to give him a thousand yuan,
But he shook his head, and sighed,
‘I’d rather keep it a curio,
It’s just a question of pride.’
I raised my bid, ten thousand yuan
And his face broke into a smile,
‘For that I would sell my mother’s hand,
And she’s been gone for a while.’

I paid the money and took the lamp
Then wandered into the street,
Held my breath and I thought of death,
And then of my aching feet,
Shanghai was a couple of months away
If I walked as the rivers flowed,
So I rubbed the lamp and I made a wish,
Woke up on the Nanjing Road.

It only had taken a minute or so
To travel a thousand miles,
I put the lamp in my haversack
And warmed to the Shanghai smiles,
I had a meal, and rented a room
And fell in bliss on the bed,
What I could do with another wish
Was the thought that entered my head.

I’m writing this by the flickering light
Of a candle, stuck in the lamp,
All I can smell is candlewax
And the air in here is damp,
I rubbed the lamp and I made a wish
But smoke poured out of the spout,
The Djinn took off with a howl of glee,
There’s no way of getting out!

David Lewis Paget

It was hard in the Moonta Mines that year
For the miners, down in the pit,
It wasn’t a place for a weak man, but
The Cornish Miners had grit,
They burrowed deeper with every day
Extracting the copper ore,
And the skimps grew high in the heaps that piled
Not far from the Moonta shore.

They wore their helmets deep in the mine
With a candle fixed to the brim,
And worked in the glow of the candlelight
While the pumps pumped out and in,
They pumped for water, they pumped for air
For the air in the mine was rank,
And water seeped at the lowest lode
Where the atmosphere was dank.

They built their cottages out of lime
And mud, with a building board,
On Sundays, that was the only time
Once they had prayed to the Lord,
The Cornish Miners were Methodists
Built numerous churches there,
And Cap’n Hancock had said, ‘Attend!
Or your job is gone – Beware!’

Those men of flint had hearts of gold
And they raised their children fine,
Sons would follow their fathers then
And go to work in the mine,
One Christmas Eve they were gathered there
By their hundreds, on the green,
A candle lit on their helmets each
Like a glittering starlit scene.

The wives and children were there as well
With their voices raised in praise,
The swelling sound of an angel choir
With their humble miners ways,
They called it Carols by Candlelight
And the movement grew apace,
It spread all over the world from this
The Moonta Miners grace.

David Lewis Paget

The beach, it circles round to the Cape
As a frame to a Prussian blue seascape,
While cliffs arch up to a vaulting sky
To claw at the clouds just passing by;
     But nobody heeds them now, nor I.

The sea, it grumbles or lies sublime
Content in its deeps, or marking time,
Then storms its breakers onto the beach
In search of the mountains, out of reach;
     With nothing to learn, and none to teach.

The sky, it hovers and looking down
Hangs over the earth, both green and brown
Where nature, in its fecundity
Runs wild and free from the sky and sea;
     And unattended by God, or me.

While cottages lie like a pile of bones
Or an ancient monster’s stepping stones,
And none of them cared where man came from
Nor where he went while the sun still shone;
     Once they were here, but now they’re gone!

David Lewis Paget

Out in the children’s playground
On the wasteland, near the flat,
There once was a shiny roundabout
They called ‘The Witches Hat’,
It hung from a greasy centre pole
And would spin, just like a top,
For once that we set it spinning
It would take an hour to stop.

They painted the Hat in black shellac
So it gleamed beneath the sun,
But stood like an evil entity, in the dark
When the day was done,
We never ventured abroad by night
For the land, we thought, was cursed,
With the Witches Hat a reminder of
Just what had stood there first.

Once it had been a Magic Wood
With Elves, and Grimms and Ghosts,
Witches covens and Goblins ovens
We heard about the most,
The land was cleared for a new estate
And they called the land a park,
But nights you heard the muffled shuffle
Of dancing, in the dark.

It was then that they set the Witches Hat
Up on a pole to spin,
One of us ran around with it
While others sat on the brim,
We always ran with it clockwise
Then stood back to count the spins,
For Mother Malloy had warned us
Never to turn it widdershins.

She said it would stop the earth, and that
The sun would go back down,
The Prince of Darkness lay in wait
For the Witches Hat, his crown,
We thought that she must be bonkers
And we laughed each time she frowned,
But never would spin the Witches Hat
Not once, the other way round.

But then on an Autumn afternoon
When the nights were coming in,
Mother said, ‘Take your brother out,
Go take him out for a spin.’
She wanted to clean the house, she said,
‘And you’re always in the way!’
So I took young Robin out with me,
He’d just turned four that day.

I put him up on the Witches Hat
And I spun, and spun him round,
But Robin was a querulous child
And he cried, to put him down.
So then in a ******-minded mood
And after a dozen spins,
I stopped the Hat and I turned it round,
And ran with it, widdershins.

It must have been almost dusk by then
For the sun dropped into the ground,
The Moon came up with a silver beam
And it lit the whole surround,
I ran as fast as I’d ever run
And the Hat spun like a top,
Robin sat on the opposite side
So I’d see him, once I’d stop.

I ran until I was out of breath
Then I stopped to watch it spin,
But no-one was on the Witches Hat
And I felt the fear begin,
I searched and scoured the land around
And I crawled beneath the Hat,
The little fellow had disappeared
So I ran back home to the flat.

I’ll always remember that awful day,
The day when the fates were cast,
I’d spun him into the future, or
I’d left him there in the past,
I shouldn’t have turned it widdershins
But now can’t bring him back,
At night it gleams in a pale moonbeam
That terrible Witches Hat!

David Lewis Paget

The spirit of Christmas was here again
As they rocked on up to my door,
The aunts and uncles and cousins, all
I’d not even seen before,
They’d smelt the turkey, they’d seen the tree
With its lights, red yellow and green,
They’d even come with their knives and forks
In case that my own weren’t clean.

They came in a rush at twelve o’clock,
‘Now we’re not too late, we trust?
We got caught up at Aunt Mary’s, then
We missed the eleven-ten bus,
She says she’ll not be cooking this year
So we didn’t have time to lose,
She’ll hurry along with a minute to spare
As soon as she puts on her shoes.’

I said, ‘Oh good!’ as they filed on in
To wash their hands in the sink,
Then counted heads and I gulped and saw
The turkey begin to shrink,
A single bird for eleven heads
Or twelve if you counted me,
I might just get a wing and a prayer
When feeding this family.

They found the chest with the beer in ice
But there wasn’t enough for all,
So they corked and drank the fine Rosé
That I’d had displayed on the wall,
They ground the peanuts into the rug
And they spilled Chablis on the couch,
Then kept on stumbling over my feet
And all I could say was ‘Ouch!’

They sat around with an hour to wait
While the turkey started to brown,
And talked of family members that
They thought were coming on down,
But then the topic they all enjoyed
Was raising its ugly head,
‘You’d never believe,’ said Cousin Steve
But Auntie Caroline’s dead!’

‘I heard she fell from the Pepper Tree
With the pruning shears in her grasp,
Into a deadly swarm of bees!’
You could hear the others gasp.
‘And George, remember George, he was
Your Uncle’s cousin’s son,
He fell right under a train; they said
He had a blindfold on.’

Then Gustave from the German branch
And Heidi from the Swiss,
Had both expired in some dread fire,
I’d not heard any of this!
‘Delaney died in Ottawa
When he fell dead off his horse,
And Orson choked on a bottle of coke
That was really chilli sauce!’

I cleared my throat before I spoke
‘I would hate to interrupt,
But listening to your Death Watch List
Has made my mind right up.
I don’t know a single one of you,
You've not been here before,
But you’ll find who you are related to
If you’d like to try next door.’

David Lewis Paget

The sky was a smudge-coloured blue up there
When the sailing ship came in,
With full top gallants and spinnaker flared
Full flight from a world of sin,
The mermaid carved on her prow was proud
As she breasted the salt-licked spray,
Her hair a-stream, as the waves she ploughed
And surged to Ascension Bay.

I’d watched her approach from the Sailor’s Rest
That lay way up on the cliff,
‘It isn’t a question of when,’ he’d said,
‘Nor even a question of if!
The ghost of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’
Comes in with a clear blue sky,
It happens but once a year,’ he’d said
‘On the twenty-fifth of July!’

I’d laughed at him in the ‘Admiral’s Arms’
As he swallowed his seventh ale,
While others listened with frightened eyes
Each face was a shade of pale,
‘You’ll see it best from the Sailor’s Rest,
That ruin, up on the cliff,
But don’t get caught by the devil’s cohort
Swarming up from the ship.’

They’d scaled the cliff to the Sailor’s Rest,
I knew the story of old,
Had slain the crew of the ‘Captain Teck’,
Or so it was always told,
They’d left the ‘Rest’ in a sea of flames
For the sake of an ancient feud,
While ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’ lay wrecked
By the mutineers that crewed.

They’d seized young Molly, the serving girl
Who’d worked at the Sailor’s Rest,
Had pulled her hair and had pinned her down,
Exposed the girl at the breast,
They took their pleasure and dragged her out
To the edge of the cliff, and pale,
Then flung her screaming down to the deck
Of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’.

And so it was that I lay with the glass
So firmly fixed to my eye,
Up on the cliff by the Sailor’s Rest
On the twenty-fifth of July,
The ghostly ship flew into the shore
Under a mass of sail,
No sign of the crew, no lookout stood
On watch at the forward rail.

The ship ground up on the Daley Rocks
Rose shrieking, up in the air,
Her timbers creaking and groaning with
The mermaid’s look of despair,
The crew poured out of the lower decks
And flung themselves overboard,
These phantoms, straight from the devil’s lair
To put good men to the sword.

I ran some way from the Sailor’s Rest
Lay under a bush, and hid,
I didn’t know what to do for the best
But watched, to see what they did,
They swarmed all over the Sailor’s Rest
Put everyone to the sword,
Then dragged poor Molly out on the grass
And I cried, ‘Please stop them, Lord!’

Then the phantoms stopped as they heard my cry
And they turned, each black as sin,
Molly let out a quivering sigh
And they burst in flames, within,
She stood alone at the edge of the cliff
And she waved, no longer pale,
While the mermaid smiled on the prow of the ship,
‘The Falls of Borrowdale.’

David Lewis Paget

I have nothing left to say
All my thoughts have blown away,
And I dread the sun that rises in the morning,
For my wife will look at me
Knowing all my history,
While my emptiness is all that I was born in.

For the world has bled me dry
Took the tears I meant to cry,
And corrupted everything that I believed in,
All the things I thought were right
Disappeared overnight,
Leaving only false ideals that were deceiving.

All I see is greed and hate
Love that tends to dissipate,
And the friends that turn away when you are needing,
All the former friends before
Who came knocking at your door,
But don’t want to know the score when you are bleeding.

Life is much too long alone
When your family has grown
Leaving just the faintest essence of their passing,
When they find the world out there
They have little left to share
But the faded photographs you lived your past in.

I was young, but now I’m old
So the story has been told
And there’s little in the future I’ll be keeping,
But a faded, caring wife
Who stood by me in this life,
And will still be by my side when we are sleeping.

David Lewis Paget

There’s a man been hung at the old crossroads
In the village of Little Deeping,
And in his pockets a couple of toads
That were there when they caught him, creeping,
They bound his arms and they hung him high
On the bough of a mystic rowan,
And filled his stuttering mouth with straw
To quell the spell of his going.

The village is set in a mystery
That was old when the world was growing,
Three thousand years of its history
Is lost to the world, unknowing,
The valley’s not in the land of them
Who are yet to stumble upon it,
For men live now as they once lived then
With their wives in a primrose bonnet.

And superstition is rife down there
In the village of Little Deeping,
Where women never reveal their hair
With men in the meadow, reaping,
They take their water deep from a well
And light each cottage with lamplight,
Using a primitive type of oil
That seeps from the soil, in moonlight.

Their brides leap over a witches broom
When the harvest grain is swelling,
Under the beams of a crescent moon
With a bonfire near their dwelling,
They change their partners every year
If their bellies haven’t swollen,
Or hang their charms up over the door
So their offspring won’t be stolen.

They live their lives by the Druid gods
Who would bring about the seasons,
And never question the rights and wrongs
For nature has its reasons,
Their days began at the break of dawn
To the sound of the cockerel crowing,
An ancient bird with its comb and spurs
That would bring the sun up, showing.

But Tam Eilann was a surly man
Who would often lie in, sleeping,
Dreaming away the early day
While the rest were out there, reaping,
He hated hearing the cockerel crow
As it bid the sun, its rising,
When he said, ‘that cockerel has to go,’
He was more than just surmising.

One autumn night, he snuffed his light
Went out in the darkness, creeping,
And caught the only cockerel left
In the village of Little Deeping,
His knife flashed once in the cold moonlight
And left the cockerel dying,
His neighbours hurried to see the sight
Of their only cockerel, lying.

‘You’ve shamed the gods and must pay the odds,’
They said as they bound him, crying,
Then hung him high on the rowan tree
And cursed, as they watched him dying.
The cattle low in the byre still
And the bees, they stay in the hive,
For there’s not been a single sunrise there
Since the day the cockerel died.

David Lewis Paget

Nobody knows where the Ragman goes
In the wee, small hours of the morn,
When he’s taken the dray with your rags away
Through the pin-point eye of a storm.
He came to stay while you were away
And your sister gave him your dress,
The one with the dreams and the bright sequins
Sewn in to the lace at the breast.

She said that you wouldn’t be needing it
Since your dreams have faded to dust,
When all those hundreds of bright sequins
Were dimmed, and turning to rust,
But the Ragman knew that he’d capture you
If he made away with your dreams,
And sits unpicking your party dress
With a razor blade at the seams.

Your sister Grace has a second face
That she turns when she’s not near you,
In a zealous, jealous and carping place
That she keeps well hidden from view,
For nobody gives her a second glance
While she schemes and dreams and plots,
To plant your beauty deep in the ground
With a host of forget-me-nots.

Don’t peer too long from the balcony,
Don’t stand too long at the edge,
She’s loosened the rail you lean upon
And thrown the bolt in the hedge,
A sudden rush and a simple push
Will send you a long way down,
While she prepares her look of despair
As they plant you there in the ground.

I’m only a menial footman here
But my love is stamped on my face,
I’m going to track the Ragman down
And bring him back to this place,
I’ve seen his dray by a cottage door
In the forest of chills and frost,
And seen the women he buys and sells
Who wander the forest, lost.

Your sister sips on a nightly draught
As she sits and watches the Moon,
Plotting to see the end of you,
I know that it’s coming soon.
I’ll drop a potion into her drink
And tie her up in a sack,
Then throw her up on the Ragman’s dray,
She’ll never be coming back.

He’ll take her deep in the forest there
To the caves of unshriven souls,
Then put her up on the auction block
And sell her to one of the trolls.
The bolt is back in the balcony rail
And the potion’s in her drink,
The Ragman’s dray is coming today
And your sister’s at the brink!

David Lewis Paget

He worked in a great Department Store
As the window dresser’s mate,
Carting mannequins, wigs and clothes
From the back through an iron gate,
The store room piled to the roof with props
And the bolts of coloured drapes,
Was dark and damp, and a single lamp
Traced shadows through coats and capes.

The store stood over a hundred years
Was red brick to the core,
And towered above the other shops
Right up to the seventh floor,
They said there were gargoyles on the eaves
That would spout when the gutters filled,
And a Griffin standing with evil claws
That would leave a brave man chilled.

The buyer sat in a closet room
Where he’d watch the assistants work,
And call them in for the slightest sin
If he caught them trying to shirk,
He would warn them once, would warn them twice
He would warn them three times more,
Then send them packing to personnel
Way up on the seventh floor.

Nobody ever came back from there
Not even to punch their card,
Their coats and hats were collected up
And thrown, tossed out in the yard,
The beggars hovered around out back
When they heard the buyer roar,
‘Get your faggoty, skinny ***
On up to the seventh floor!’

Peter Peeps had been sound asleep
In the window well one day,
Trying to quell a head of Moselle
He’d imbibed, with Martha Hay,
A girl that worked on the second floor
With a line of maiden bra’s,
He’d had as much of a chance with her
As a flight to the planet Mars!

The buyer came to the window well
And he saw him sound asleep,
Then yelled, ‘Get up to the seventh floor,
You’re finished, Peter Peeps!’
So Peter sighed, and he took a ride
On the escalator up,
Higher than ever he’d been before,
His heart in a paper cup.

On the seventh floor was an old oak door
In a passageway filled with gloom,
A flickering gaslight either side
As he stepped through, into the room,
A metronome was ticking away
In a long, slow measured swing,
When a man in an old Top Hat approached,
‘Are you looking for anything?’

‘They sent me here to collect my pay,
Is there anything I should sign?’
‘You’ll get no pay from the Firm today
But you’re here, so now you’re mine!’
Peter backed to the old oak door
That had latched as he came in,
There wasn’t a handle on that side
And the man was looking grim.

‘You’ll never get out of here again,
You’ll have to work for your tea,
I’ll fix you up with a ledger, here
It’s eighteen seventy-three,
The seventh floor is a time-warp that
Was set when the store was built,
And all of you shirkers end up here
While you’re working off your guilt.’

He showed him the rows and rows of desks
Like a mid-Victorian link,
With everyone filling the ledgers in
With a pen they dipped in ink,
And there was Roger, and there was Ann
And there was Fiona Shaw,
He’d watched them once, all weaving their way
On up to the seventh floor.

The windows looked down onto the street
But it wasn’t a street he knew,
There wasn’t a horseless carriage there
And the other shops were few,
‘What if I smash the window here
And jump on out to be free?’
‘Then you will be buried before you’re born
In eighteen seventy-three!’

Peter Peeps looks out on a world
That had gone before he knew,
Then turns the page of his ledger back
To eighteen seventy-two,
There are rows and rows of figures there
That were written before his day,
But the one thing that he’s smiling for
Is the arrival of Martha Hay!

David Lewis Paget