He’d lain off the island just a week,
It was really only a reef,
That ****** up out of the waters
Ninety miles from Tenerife.
It didn’t show up on a local map
And he thought he’d heard it said,
‘Be sure, if you think of sailing west
That you miss the Isle of the Dead.’

On the higher part was a grove of trees
He explored when he went ashore,
And hidden deep in the foliage was
A house, not seen before.
It was made of wood, and covered in vines
That acted as camouflage,
It couldn’t be seen ‘til you came up close,
And stood with the door ajar.

He thought it must be deserted, though
A garden was weeded out,
And then, as he had approached the door
He was pulled up short, by a shout.
‘Who’s this, who enters my private grounds,
Who’s this, who plays with my head?
We never have visitors here, you know,
For this is the Isle of the Dead!’

He turned, was facing a sprightly girl
With a mass of auburn hair,
She wore a costume of paw paw leaves
That had made him stand and stare,
Her eyes reflected the brightest blue
Of the ocean, out in the bay,
And her mouth affected the slightest pout
As he wondered what to say.

A woman came through the cottage door
And she said, ‘Come in, Narreen,
We never talk to the strangers, for
You don’t know where they’ve been.’
Her manner was quite unfriendly as
She gestured to the shore,
‘You’d better be making way, my friend,’
Then shut the makeshift door.

He slept on his vessel every night
But he came ashore at dawn,
Hoping to get the briefest sight
Of the girl, for his heart was torn.
He hesitated to call it love
But it grew, each time he saw,
Her figure appear from the grove of trees,
Or saunter along the shore.

She finally came to talk to him
And squatted to hear him tell,
Tales of the wondrous world out there
Of jewels and gold as well,
Her eyes grew brighter with every tale
And he said, ‘You should come with me,
We’ll sail on the balmy Autumn swell
And you’ll see the world for free.’

Her sister came to the beach one day
And she took the girl back home,
‘I think that it’s time you sailed away,
We haven’t the need to roam.’
But he came ashore the following day
And he lured the girl to his boat,
She seemed surprised at the size of it
And the fact that it could float.

He tried to sooth, as he raised the sail
‘We’ll just go out for a spin,’
But she was suddenly nervous, and
She asked that they go back in.
He thought that he’d made the girl his own
As they sailed from the bay, at last,
But then he noticed the withered crone
Who clung, in death, to the mast!

David Lewis Paget

He was hanging in line with the elder trees
From an oak that had broken the line,
That’s why they probably missed him, he
Became as one in design.
He wore a shabby old overcoat
But his hat lay there on the ground,
It wasn’t until a jogger who fell
Looked up, that the man was found.

The firemen cut his body down
While the police stood back a pace,
Then loaded him into an ambulance
With a consequent lack of grace.
His eyes were staring, his jaw was slack
And his arms flopped north and south,
But most of all, and what appalled
Was the purple tongue in his mouth.

Nobody seemed to know who he was
His clothing tags had been cut,
There wasn’t a wallet or envelope
In the pockets of his old coat.
‘He must be someone, but who knows who?
And why was he hanging there?
Could this have been ****** or suicide,
And really, does anyone care?’

He didn’t come up on the Missing List,
Nor his face on a Mug Shot file,
No-one was desperately phoning in,
He must have been gone for a while.
‘There’s a picture there, on his retina,’
The photographer said at last,
‘If we blow it up, it might give us a clue,
What he saw at his final gasp.’

The rope had been knotted behind his neck
So his head had been angled down,
His eyes had bulged as the blood withdrew
And snapped what he saw on the ground.
A woman was stood there, looking up
With an anguished look on her face,
Her hands together, as if in prayer
But holding a can of Mace.

The police supplied an identikit
And published it over the news,
They passed it around the prison guards
And questioned most of the Screws.
But they didn’t mention the woman there
Reflected in each of his eyes,
They kept that piece of forensic back
As their own well kept surprise.

The plain clothes men at the funeral
Were alert, but hid in the trees,
They’d made it known where the man was going
And when, to the cemetery,
So when a woman in black appeared
To watch as the coffin fell,
They swooped, and took her in charge right then
As she cried, ‘I’ve been in Hell!’

She cried all over the interview,
They thought that her heart would break,
‘I messed right up,’ was her one refrain,
‘It was one great big mistake!
We’d been together, over a year
And I loved him, he was nice,
But then he began to dabble in drugs
And he played about with ice.’

‘I begged and begged, but he wouldn’t stop,
And his violent side came out,
He ran amok and he wrecked our home
And he’d start to scream and shout,
I should have gone to the police right then,
Should have had him in rehab,
But I bought the Mace to protect myself,
I know, you must think I’m mad!’

‘Then he’d sober up, see what he’d done
And would be so full of remorse,
I had to forgive him, every time
Just as a matter of course,
Until the day that he knocked me down
And I said, ‘No going back!
I can’t put up with this any more,’
Then he took the rope from the shack.’

‘I followed him into the woods out there
And I tried to talk him down,
But he climbed the oak and he tied the rope
And he told me, with a frown,
‘The devil has got me by the throat
And I died when hitting you,
I’ll never deserve of your love again
What a terrible thing to do!’

‘Then he jumped,’ she said, and burst the dam
For her tears would never stop,
She went back into the woods again
To plant forget-me-nots,
And I heard she’d died of a broken heart
And was buried where he lies,
But still lives on in that photograph
As seen in a dead man’s eyes!

David Lewis Paget

‘The time’s become fleeting and flying,
And rushing me off to the grave,’
Or so would say Roderick Styling,
‘It’s sweeping me on like a wave.’
I found his remarks so depressing
I’d walk on the side of the street
Where I knew he wouldn’t be walking,
On hearing the sound of his feet.

He’d corner me back in the office,
Unburden his pure misery,
Or catch me in field or in coppice,
To tell me his bleak history.
For often I’d find he was waiting
Wherever he shouldn’t have been,
I found that I couldn’t avoid him,
His whispers and chatter obscene.

‘We’ve only one life, so enjoy it,’
I’d counter, when he would begin,
But then he would start to destroy it,
By saying that life became grim.
‘The older you get, so the faster,
It races along like a train,
Is headed for certain disaster,
The end of the journey is pain.’

Then he seemed to age by the minute,
His skin became wrinkled and worn,
Despair, he would seem to dive in it,
And had since the day he was born.
‘You’ll not do yourself any favours,’
I’d say, ‘when it hangs on each breath,
For life will not gift what it savours,
If you’re so determined on death.’

But one day I looked in the mirror,
And saw what I never had seen,
The markings of age, like a river,
Were flowing, where once youth had been.
I tried to ignore it by sighing
That ageing was lending me grace,
But I could see Roderick Styling
Was staring right back in my face.

And that’s when I knew life was fleeting
I had to seize what there was left,
I sent him a note for a meeting
While I was still feeling bereft.
He lies in a grave in a coppice
A jagged hole under his jaw,
While I work alone, in the office,
He’d got what he’d been looking for.

David Lewis Paget

Elizabeth Warr was the woman next door,
They called her a witch and a hag,
We lived in a lane that was called ‘Little Payne’
Though what there was lived in her bag,
She carried a hammer, a sharp bladed knife
A corkscrew and two leather twists,
The corkscrew she carried for putting out eyes,
The leather for binding of wrists.

She’d been more than sane up until the back lane
Had revealed that her daughter was courting,
Who’d never told anyone who she had met
Till they found her the following morning,
But she had been ravaged, her body was savaged
Her skirt was pulled over her head,
And blood ran in rivulets down to her ankles
Elizabeth’s daughter was dead.

And that’s when she swore that revenge would be hers
As she haunted the back lanes and alleys,
Carting the murderous tools in her bag
And noting who dillies and dallies,
‘He’ll try it again, and I will be there,’
She announced to her friends and her neighbours,
‘They always return to the scene of the crime
And the place of their murderous labours.’

The months had gone by with barely a sign
He’d ever come back to the midden,
With no-one attacked, he hadn't looked back
So guessing the culprit, forbidden.
But then on a line in the communal yard
A scarf fluttered high on the line,
Elizabeth saw it and reached out and caught it
And muttered, ‘I know that, it’s mine!’

Her daughter had borrowed that scarf for one night
The night that she’d thought to go courting,
And then in the horror, the fear and the fright
The scarf wasn’t there in the morning.
Elizabeth watched who collected the scarf
The mother of Alan John Sidden,
Then carried her bag to the rear of the park
While she waited for dark, to be hidden.

They say there were screams and loud howls in the dark
On that night in the early September,
And smoke in the trees that would waft in the breeze
Along with some foul smelling embers,
When Sidden was found, what was left, on the ground
In the morning, his throat cut, it’s true,
They said that his eyes were a gruesome surprise
They’d been taken by some sort of *****.

David Lewis Paget

She stood and she watched as the storm came in
With the wreck of the Unicorn,
Its forward cabins under the swell,
Its masts so high and forlorn,
Her sailors dashed on the wicked rocks
To colour the blood-red foam,
‘Oh where, oh where is my sister Kate,’
She cried with a blood-red moan.

I reached on out and I spread the shawl
To cover her auburn hair,
The wind and rain in our faces as
I stood by the wall, with Claire,
The wreck was merely a hundred yards,
Was foundering near the shore,
With not a single man on the spars
Where the sail had billowed before.

We heard the bowsprit grind on the rocks,
The rudder tear from the post,
And Claire gave out the cry of the lost
To call for the customs boat,
The waves came thundering onto the shore
Flung spindrift high in the air,
Its mist obscured what the waves had lured
To drift in a mute despair.

‘How may I save my sister Kate,’ she cried,
But I couldn’t tell,
The Unicorn was coming apart
Was bound on its trip to hell,
And Kate by locking her cabin door
To keep out the surging sea,
Had forged herself a coffin before
The schooner had ceased to be.

We found her there in the flooded room
With the wreck cast up on the shore,
The moment the storm had shed its gloom
And the sun shone bright once more,
With gentle currents making her sway
And seaweed caught in her hair,
She held a locket her sister gave
With the line, ‘Bon voyage, Claire.’

David Lewis Paget

I didn’t have much to put down… He said,
‘You wouldn’t get much with that.’
I’d wanted to buy a cottage while
The housing market was flat.
With prices as low as they’d ever been
I thought I’d be in with a chance,
‘Unless you go to that rustic show
The village of Experance.’

‘The place has been empty for thirty years
With cottages up for a song,
There is no power, no place for a shower,’
But I thought I couldn’t go wrong.
He drove me out to the village green,
Each garden was choked with weeds,
I’d buy most anything, sight unseen,''
As long as it suited my needs.

I picked one out with the roof intact
And the walls preserved with lime,
Some of the window panes were cracked,
I could fix them anytime.
The rooms were small, but overall
It would suit me down to a ’T’,
I didn’t have anyone in my life
I was single, young and free.

I brought what furniture I had left
And settled it down inside,
Then spent a week with a cleaning brush
It was just a question of pride.
I finally had my home sweet home
But lit with a paraffin lamp,
The water I drew from a well out back,
The walls were a trifle damp.

There wasn’t another soul to be seen
They’d all moved away, or died,
I felt a little bit lonely there
But I walked the countryside.
I checked each cottage, the ancient hall
And the church, way down in the dell,
Someone had painted a cross on the door
And underlined it with ‘Hell’.

One night I listened and heard a step
Out there on the path outside,
Got up and walked to the window, and
Out there was a beautiful bride.
She stood uncertain, unveiled her face
Her make-up was streaked with tears,
But when I opened the cottage door
The woman had disappeared.

I saw the groom on the following day
He stood by the next cottage down,
I waved, and thought he would look my way
But all that he did was frown.
He turned and entered the cottage door
But it didn’t creak, or slam,
And when I looked, the weeds on the floor
Said empty, no sign of the man.

One night, I heard a sound in the hall
Like music and shuffling feet,
So wandered down, and stood by the wall
While lights shone out in the street,
But when I entered, the place was grim
And shrouded in silence and gloom,
I stood there shivering, on my own,
It felt like the depths of a tomb.

At night, I finally started to dream
And I saw the bride in her lace,
She came and tapped on my window pane
With tears streaming down her face,
‘You have to come, a man with a gun,
Has shattered my wedding dream,’
I tossed and turned, until I awoke
Then pondered on what I’d seen.

One Sunday late, and fully awake
I wandered down to the church,
And by the time that I stood outside
I could hear the wedding march.
I pushed the door and it swung out wide
As I entered there in the gloom,
Then heard the sound of a pistol shot
That echoed across that room.

And just for a moment, they were there,
The spectres of what had been,
The wedding party standing in shock
As I looked at that terrible scene.
A shape ran past me, out at the door
As the bride let out a cry,
And there the groom, lay dead on the floor
With blood running out of his eye.

It faded then, and I was alone
In this dreadful church in the dell,
Where someone had painted a bright red cross
And underlined it with ‘Hell’.
A curse must have come on the village that night
When the villagers all had cried,
For all that was left were the ghosts of death
From the night that the bridegroom died.

David Lewis Paget

We hadn’t been in the house for long,
We’d moved in overnight,
I hadn’t explored the neighborhood,
As a kid, that wasn’t right,
But the only time I had to see
After the daily chores,
Was after dark when my bike and me
Were free to roam outdoors.

I’d had to go to a brand new school
And I met this creepy kid,
He seemed to be breaking every rule
With the crazy things he did,
But I was the only friend he had
So he’d meet me after dark,
And we would ride through the neighborhood
And down through the Chestnut Park.

He said that he’d lived there all his life
Did I really want a thrill?
He’d take and show me where Noah’s Ark
Was buried under the hill,
Or maybe I’d like to see the train
That they called the Ten-0-One,
Whose boiler blew in the evening dew
And dismembered everyone.

The night was right for a ghostly tale
There was neither Star nor Moon,
In truth the sky had been overcast
Since the early afternoon,
We rode our bikes to the railway track
On the far side of the park,
I couldn’t see either path or tree
As we rode there in the dark.

At almost ten we could hear the train
As it laboured up the hill,
And then the sparks from its stack were seen
In the smoke it chuffed out still,
It loomed up black, and covered in soot
And I looked to see my friend,
Who stood on top of the tender coal
As it passed me on the bend.

I called out, ‘How did you get up there?’
As he danced, while looking scared,
A crazy look in his eyes up where
The glow from the fire box flared,
‘Come up,’ he screamed, ‘or you’ll miss the fun,’
But the train ran down the hill,
And left me stood by the bike he left
While I felt a sudden chill.

The sky lit up with the brightest light
That I’ve ever seen, I swear,
But even so, there wasn’t a sound
As the train blew up out there,
It left me shivering in the dark
There wasn’t a thought of fun,
I’d caught a glimpse of my watch before
It was just on Ten-0-One.

I rode back down the following day
To dispel the fear I felt,
My creepy friend had gone away
Though his bike lay where I knelt,
The railway line from a distant time
Was rusted and lay undone,
For never a train in eighty years
Had followed that Ten-0-One.

David Lewis Paget

Back in the days of the old gas lamps
When the streets were lit, but dim,
A young lamplighter would tour the streets
And the houses, looking in,
The flickering flame of each lamp would light
The windows in the dark,
He’d see what he wasn’t meant to see
In the light of each flickering spark.

He saw what he thought was an angel
Through a window in Lygon Street,
Sitting in front of a mirror,
Looking down, and washing her feet.
Her hair trailed over her shoulders like
Some golden ears of corn,
Then she looked up, and her bright blue eyes
Made him feel he was new-born.

Her lips were set in a steady pout
And were red and ripe to kiss,
Her brows were raised as she looked his way
And his heart felt instant bliss,
While she looked through her window pane
At the face of an angel boy,
Who, breathing mist on her window glass
Had scribbled his name there, ‘Roy’.

Their eyes had locked with each other when
He framed his lips in a kiss,
And she stood up and approached him,
Then she put her lips to his,
They stayed so long that the glass had warmed
But the mist spread round about,
Till neither could see the other it
Had blotted each vision out.

Then every night he had lingered there
With his taper to her lamp,
And shivered out on the footpath for
The nights were getting damp,
He hoped that she would be sitting where
She had sat, before the kiss,
But nothing had moved within that room
From that day until this.

He didn’t know but she’d had to go
To stay on her uncle’s farm,
To breathe the purer air out there
Than the fog that did her harm,
She still spat blood in her handkerchief
But she thought about the boy,
Who’d kissed her once through a window pane
And the thought still brought her joy.

David Lewis Paget

The hull was that of a freighter, merchant,
Old, but still under steam,
It rose from off the horizon, distant,
Out of somebody’s dream,
Its livery had been dull and black
But now it flaked and it peeled,
The paint rose up on bubbles of rust
It was once designed to have sealed.

And from its stack there was dark grey smoke
That rose and spread on the sea,
Fouling the air in a narrow track
So they wouldn’t be seen by me,
We put the coastal cutter about
And raised the flag in the sun,
So Sally could see we were headed out
As she went on the Black Dog run.

The day was done it was almost dusk
When we entered that trail of smoke,
The freighter, ‘Emily Greensleeves’ must
Have burnt off a ton of coke,
We only saw her faint through a haze
And never a single crew,
But only Sally up on the bridge
As the dog came rabbiting through.

The dog, as black as a tinker’s ***
Raced back and forth on the deck,
Not so much as a chain restraint
Or a collar stud at its neck,
It stood there slavering down at us
When we got up close with a gun,
And often we thought to pick it off
When out on the Black Dog run.

But then the freighter would slip away
Deep in its trail of smoke,
And we’d be left alone in the bay
Trying to breathe, not choke,
Others have said they will bring her in
This ghostly girl, with a gun,
But nobody’s able to pin her down
When out on the Black Dog run.

David Lewis Paget

I’d always wanted a castle, so
I bought one in the Spring.
It wasn’t much of a castle,
Overgrown with everything,
Ivy covered the castle walls
There were trees on the battlements,
And bushes grew in the courtyard,
But I bought the place for cents.

They said it hadn’t been lived in since
The days of Charles the First,
And Cromwell’s troops had reduced it with
A mighty cannon burst.
The gatehouse lay in a ruin where
The Army stormed inside,
And hunted down the defenders there
Who, to a man, had died.

The women, hid in the kitchen there,
Eventually were caught,
The older ones had their throats cut,
But the young ones kept for sport,
And Lady May in her boudoir, she
Was seized by a Captain Clyne,
Who dragged her out by her hair, and said,
‘Not this one, she’ll be mine!’

He ripped and clawed at her bodice till
She was exposed to view,
She screamed that he was an animal,
‘I’ll never lie with you!’
He laughed and shackled her hands and feet
And he took his wicked will,
She sobbed to say he would have to pay
For the ****** blood he’d spilled.

‘I’ll hunt you down like the cur you are,
I will follow you through time,
My downline will seek yours to ****
For vengeance will be mine.’
He laughed, but fate, it had lain in wait
When a pile of shattered stones,
That hung so perilous by the gate
Had crushed his evil bones.

I took delight in the story when
I purchased this ancient pile,
And sat in the ancient boudoir where
I was pensive, for a while.
So this was the place that it happened,
Just above a flagstoned stair,
The **** of an ancient beauty, that
Had seeped in the walls in there.

It took some months to clean up the place
Ripping out each bush and tree,
Till Castle Krake was taking shape
And making a home for me.
I slept up there in the boudoir
During those long, cold winter nights,
With only a blazing brazier
And a sputtering torch for lights.

One night I heard a commotion, it
Was down by the Castle Keep,
A sound, a clashing of soldiers,
I woke from a shallow sleep.
And then was a woman sobbing,
It echoed within the walls,
For soon she screamed, ‘I will hunt you down,’
As I lay there, quite appalled.

Since then, there have been accidents
Of masonry falls and such,
The brazier set my bed alight
I escaped by just a touch,
It’s all to do with that Captain Clyne
And the curse of Lady May,
For Captain Clyne’s in my mother’s line
So I don’t feel safe today.

David Lewis Paget

She had met this handsome stranger
So she told me, at some dance,
And I knew then she’d be leaving me,
I didn’t stand a chance,
She had not seemed so excited since
I’d given her a ring,
But I saw she wasn’t wearing it,
It didn’t mean a thing!

So I asked her where this dance had been,
She didn’t seem to know,
She’d drifted in there like some dream
Where lovers always go,
I asked her who was there, she said
They’d glided round in grace,
And but for him, her eyes were dim,
She’d not recalled one face.

She hesitating, placed the ring
Back in my open hand,
‘I don’t have any choice,’ she said,
‘I knew you’d understand!’
I didn’t, but I bit my tongue,
No point to cause a scene,
I hoped that she’d get over it,
But something was unclean.

I sat and moped at home awhile,
She’d cut me to the quick,
I’d planned my life around her,
Marriage, children, all of it,
But then I felt resentment rise
And choke me to the core,
I’d need to see him, ****-his-eyes,
See what I’d lost her for.

So I began to roam the streets
And watch her, though unseen,
To hide in handy bushes, just
To find out where she’d been,
Then one dark night she ventured out
And walked, as in a trance,
I followed at a distance as
She went to join the dance.

The gates were flung wide open to
A long, curved gravel drive,
A house with gothic columns, where
The gargoyles looked alive,
I didn’t see another soul
As Anne had ventured in,
But ballroom music filled the air
With subtle hints of sin.

I sidled to the ballroom and
I hid, as best I could,
While phantom figures whirled about,
Transparent through each hood,
The only solid forms I saw
Were first, my trancelike Anne,
And something evil on the floor
That could have been a man.

That could have been a man, I said
Despite his long black cloak,
The horns that grew from out his head
That looked just like a goat,
The tail that flicked behind it with
A barb of polished steel,
It could have been a man, I said,
But no, that sight was real!

Behind Anne was a marble slab
With bloodstains, from before,
A pale and polished altar that
Was raised up from the floor,
He took Anne in his arms, began
To sway and dance her round,
‘You’re dancing with the Devil, Anne,’
I screamed, and held my ground.

He roared, and turned his evil face
To glare where I was stood,
My heart stood still inside me, like
My heart was made of wood,
Then Anne began to shriek, her eyes
Now seeing what I saw,
Pulled back, and disentangled from
Each evil crablike claw.

I don’t know how we got outside,
I only know we fled,
With terror stricken eyes and hearts
We thought that we were dead.
That house went up, a puff of smoke
Amid a demon roar,
Now Anne won’t dance, no handsome stranger
Tempts her anymore!

David Lewis Paget

I watched him stalk through the evergreens
In his black top hat and tails,
Just like some figure, lost in dreams
Or a voodoo doll, with wails,
I’d heard that they called him Doctor Bones
And thought that I could see why,
With teeth that gleamed like white tombstones
And a hole for a missing eye.

‘You conjure him up,’ said Marceline,
‘You bring him back from the grave,
His ancestors had laid him down
He was much too bad to save.’
She called Darleen and she told her, ‘go,
Bring a ritual bird to slay,
We have to get rid of Doctor Bones
Or Marc may die today.’

I lay back on the verandah, and
I fell in a tranceful stare,
I looked on out to the evergreens
And knew I could see him there,
He carried a stick and danced about
Then bowed with a sweep of his hat,
‘He’s dancing upon my grave,’ I said,
‘Now what do you think of that?’

Darleen came back with a feathered bird
And she danced and swung it round,
Filling the air with feathers as she
Dashed the bird on the ground,
‘Get back to the grave you came from,’
Marceline screeched out to the wood,
And Doctor Bones responded with moans
Then sank to his knees in mud.

They said that they broke my fever as
The bird had screeched at the last,
They wiped its blood all over my face
Where it seemed to set, like a cast,
I rose up out of my torpor and
Saw Darleen clutching the cat,
While I was stood by the mirror, and
Was wearing his tails and hat!

David Lewis Paget

The flats were old and the rooms were cold
But I didn’t have much choice,
I hadn’t the money for anything else
Since the spat I had with Joyce,
I’d walked the streets for almost a day
Just to find a place to stay,
When I finally found a flat to rent
The building was old and grey.

Dust was grimed on the windowsill
And mud was tramped in the hall,
Whatever was left of the carpet there
You just couldn’t see at all,
The caretaker in the bottom flat
Handed out the do’s and don’ts,
The rent on time on the topmost line,
Ahead of the wills and won’ts.

I didn’t know it was partly share
Till I’d paid, and taken the key,
Until I entered the bathroom there
And found there was more than me.
A woman sat there, painting her nails
Come in from the flat next door,
Said, ‘You’re my share?’ as she patted her hair,
‘You’d better prepare, there’s more.’

We not only shared the bathroom there
But the key to the only Loo,
There was only a single kitchen there
And it looked like we shared that too,
I wasn’t impressed, was more than depressed
And I kept on thinking of Joyce,
How could I sink so low, I thought,
But she didn’t give me a choice.

I lay in bed the following morn,
Lay in till a quarter-past two,
Why should I get up early when
There was nothing I had to do.
I thought I’d cook me a rasher or two,
Some eggs, and a slice of bread,
Till I walked out into the kitchen, then
And into a land of dread.

There were bats hung over the fireplace,
And a great big *** on the hob,
And something thin that had just been skinned
Lay over an iron ****.
There were piles of bones on the platter board
And some fingers left on a plate,
Their rings were on but the hand was gone,
Off to a dismal fate.

I whirled about in despair, in case
Someone was stalking me,
And checked the grate of the fireplace
Where the ashes glowed redly,
The *** was bubbling on the hob
And some things that looked like ears,
Kept bobbing up to the surface
Like some headless bombardiers.

I spun away to the kitchen sink
And I gazed into its depths,
Peered on in with a single blink
And I fought to keep my breath,
For staring up was a grinning skull
As the girl I saw last night,
Came leaping in like a beast of sin
And I lost my appetite.

‘It isn’t what you might think,’ she said,
‘I should have warned you, right!
We use this room for the local Rep
To rehearse their play tonight.
I set it up for the witches scene,
It’s only a plastic skull,
And plastic bats and toy skinned-cats,
Want to eat?’ I said ‘I’m full!’

David Lewis Paget

I married Rosita back in the Spring
As a new world budded with everything,
She sprang from an ancient family
Its heart in the vineyards of Tuscany.

Her skin was dark and her hair blue-black
From the blood of her father’s, way, way back,
Her family tree lay in mystery
So I thought I’d uncover their history.

Down in the damp of the cells, there lay
A mound of their documents, rotting away,
Down where the Monks had toiled below
In the crypt of the Church of De Angelo.

There I would work, and day by day
Would learn of plots where the skeletons lay,
The grinning skulls kept the plans alight
They had once conspired in the dead of night.

I asked Rosita to join me there
Way down below, at the foot of the stair,
And she came gliding, all dressed in white
Like some grim ghost with her girdle tight.

‘Why do you stir these shades,’ she said,
‘When for hundreds of years they’ve lain here dead,
It’s better we leave their old intrigues
Scattered like bones, and Autumn leaves.’

‘This is your line,’ I then replied,
‘Who lived and schemed, and who loved and died,
As one day soon you may bear a son
Who’ll need to know where he’s coming from.’

And sure enough in the month of June
There were signs that he would be coming soon,
Her forehead burned and the glass she sipped
When she came alone to the darkened crypt.

Then shadows moved in the ancient cells
Where the Monks had worked on their evil spells,
And she began to shiver and glow
In the crypt of the Church of De Angelo.

I said what I should have spoken yet
That all I had was a deep regret,
That ever I asked her to get up and go
To the crypt that lay in the church below.

But still she went on that long descent
She seemed obsessed and would not relent,
Till late one night and a baby cried
Delivered on a cold slab, and died.

I keep Rosita so close to me,
And far from her family history,
Something is creeping, evil and slow
In the crypt of the church of De Angelo.

David Lewis Paget

He sat at the railway station in
The hopes of a passing train,
There hadn’t been one for hours, while he
Was sheltering from the rain,
While over the opposite platform, sat
And sprawled on a wooden bench,
A sight to gladden a jaundiced eye,
A typical old-time *****.

For wenches were few and far between
In that post-industrial time,
As everyone wore both slacks and jeans,
And nothing to tease the mind,
But not this ***** on the wooden bench
For she wore a floral dress,
A petticoat that was made of rope
That rose to her knees, no less.

And could those have been real stockings like
They’d been when he was a lad,
With straightened seams to the land of dreams
From calf to the thigh, well clad,
It put him in mind of the garter belts
That she’d have to wear, no doubt,
He’d seen in his teenage magazines
When he was a gadabout.

She rose and walked up the platform and
She gave her brolly a whirl,
And then he noticed her bodice with
Its buttons, mother of pearl,
Her hair was combed in a bouffant, piled
Up high in an auburn wave,
And dangling from her delicate ears
Were miniature rings of jade.

Two trains pulled into the station,
One each side and they climbed aboard,
Their windows were facing each other,
He faced back, while she faced forward,
Then just for a moment he smiled at her
And she smiled back from her bench,
As he muttered to her six silent words:
‘By God! You’re a beautiful *****!’

David Lewis Paget

Right at the top of the mountain
Stood an obelisk in stone,
It pointed up to the heavens
Was inscribed with a runic poem,
It wasn’t known who had put it there
Or when, though it made no odds,
For men had seen it had always been
From the time of the ancient gods.

It had seemed to have strange properties
It changed, when the stone was wet,
Deep in the midst of a thunderstorm
It went from grey to jet,
The stone would glisten and glow at night
In a way that seemed most odd,
And when the lightning came forking down
Would act as a lightning rod.

It stood in a pleasant clearing
No tree would grow too near,
Though trees grew all up the mountainside,
I thought that fact was queer.
We’d take a picnic basket there
And settle on the *****,
Lie in the shade of the obelisk
Just me and my girlfriend, Hope.

And she would recline and rest there,
She was pleasing to the eye,
She looked like a Grecian Goddess
For her eyes would match the sky,
Her hair the colour of yellow straw,
She turned, and she sighed at me,
Then said, ‘I feel I’ve been here before
In some ancient mystery.’

She couldn’t explain just what she meant
So we lay awhile, and kissed,
Up on the sun drenched mountain top
In the shade of the obelisk,
Then she got restless and wandered up
To the face that held the runes,
And traced her fingers across the script
On that sunny afternoon.

I started up when I heard her scream
And I saw the arm and fist,
That slid on out of the solid stone
And seized her by the wrist,
The lettering of the runes lit up
And they glowed a scarlet red,
While I grabbed hold of her other arm,
Held onto her, in dread.

She couldn’t manage to free herself
The hand held her so tight,
I strained and heaved, I could not believe,
But she turned pale, and white,
Her eyes went up in her head, then she
Fell fainting to the ground,
The hand still holding her by the wrist
But now there was no sound.

A shape rose out of her body there
Of mist, I couldn’t hold,
And slid right into the solid stone,
It must have been her soul,
For then the hand, it had disappeared
And left an empty shell,
It left her body behind, but Hope,
I knew, had gone to hell.

She sits in a sanatorium
By the window, every day,
And looks unknowingly through the pane
While my pain won’t go away.
I copied the rune and translated it
And it said, ‘The God of Life,
Is trapped in stone in this Obelisk,
And he needs to find a wife…’

David Lewis Paget

‘I wish that I could be young again,’
He sighed from his easy chair,
Watching the film he’d made back then
When there was still time to spare.
‘Why would you want to go back to that,’
His wife said, ‘What about me?
We hadn’t met when you made that film
Back in 1963.’

Margaret lit an incense stick
And sandalwood filled the air,
A heavy aroma filled the room
As Derek continued to stare.
And there was his wife, at seventeen,
Just walking along the pier,
Should he go up and say hello.
Or should he just disappear?

He suddenly felt so fit, and light,
He hadn’t felt that for years,
Then turned to look at his ageing wife
As her eyes all filled with tears.
‘You wouldn’t pick me again,’ she said,
‘Not knowing what you know now,’
He would have replied, but love was dead,
Had died, he didn’t know how.

‘I wouldn’t know what I’d do again,
Given the self-same choice,’
‘Surely you would,’ said Margaret then,
‘You would have chosen Joyce.’
He thought of Joyce in the winter barn
As she rolled with him in the hay,
What was the point that she’d said goodbye,
And ended up going away?

‘You were still going with Gordon then,’
He said, as if in reply,
‘I was surprised that you went with me,
You said that you loved the guy.’
But Margaret’s tears were flowing now
And rolling along each cheek,
She should have been true to Gordon, but
He’d gone away for a week.

‘Life is just full of ironies,’
He said, while stroking her hair,
‘There was a moment, back in time,
When you were suddenly there.
I thought that you cared, and I did too,
We both of us made a choice.’
Too little, too late, to think it now,
For Gordon had married Joyce.

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

We decided to offer a non-event
For it hadn’t been done before,
We ordered a super, over-sized tent
And the grass to grow on the floor,
But the tent was cancelled the day it came
And the grass returned to the man,
For who ever heard of a non-event
That ever ran strictly to plan?

There are music events, and party events,
And horsey events, equine,
Racing events and crazy events
And lazy events, sublime.
There’s events to do most anything
Which is why I thought it true,
That the most exciting event of the year
Would be one with nothing to do.

We’d offer an awesome Rock event
With a band who wouldn’t be there,
And a totally gratis haircut, meant
For the men without any hair.
A skin tattoo for the motley crew
That we know as **** and tatts,
Then tell them the ink was really glue
For manufacturing hats.

The roads would be blocked for an hour or less
With the cars that never came,
We’d put the non-event posters up
They could read them all in vain.
I hear we’re up for a Nobel Prize
For giving it up on Lent,
That one and only, never to come see
World Class Non-Event!

David Lewis Paget

He’d always been a schoolyard bully,
You want to know the truth,
He picked on those too young and silly
To stand up to the youth,
He’d ducked the boys in the village pond
And he hurt the girls as well,
And had a tattoo on his chest,
‘Born for Raising Hell!’

He didn’t learn, he was much too dumb,
He didn’t see the need,
He couldn’t tackle a simple sum
Or spell, or write or read,
But he thought the world had owed him some
So he took it, when he could,
And robbed his innocent victims by
Wearing the coward’s hood.

The police would carry him into court
And the judge would let him go,
‘He’s had a difficult childhood, so
We must be fair, you know!’
And he would laugh when he got outside
And steal the nearest car,
He thought that he was invincible,
Some sort of rising star.

He’d hang with others as dumb as him
Who lived by a borrowed creed,
Adopt a type of a uniform
By growing an ugly beard,
They’d take the gifts of the welfare state
And would swear to tear it down,
‘The time will come that we change the laws
When our army comes to town!’

He tamed a silly, submissive girl
And he beat her black and blue,
Then made her cover from head to foot
So her bruises didn’t show,
He taught her to be subservient
To fulfil his every need,
And quoted God, with an iron rod
‘‘Obey’ shall be your creed!’

He went to fight in a foreign war
And at first they held their ground,
They slaughtered populations to
Strike fear, in every town,
But a barbarous army like their own
Appeared, and refused to yield,
And he was taken a prisoner
Out there, in a foreign field.

He thought he was going to lose his head
As he’d taken heads, before,
But they were a little more barbarous
In the way that they fought the war,
‘We’re sending you back to meet your friends,
But you won’t have time to yell…’
Then strapped him onto a missile,
‘There you go… Go Raising Hell!’

David Lewis Paget

I’d driven a bus for thirty years
At least, for more than a spell,
But now I was getting on a bit
And I wasn’t feeling well.
I’d taken a couple of sickies off
Well, more than I used to do,
And told the boss I would be okay,
It was just a dose of the flu.

But a note was waiting when I got back
All typed on a letterhead,
The company logo was large and black
And gave me a sense of dread.
I had to report to the man upstairs,
Way up on the twentieth floor,
I’d never been past the tenth for years,
Or called to account before.

I couldn’t afford to lose my job,
Cut off at my time of life,
How would I pay the mortgage, then
Explain myself to the wife?
But I took the lift as I had to do,
And stood at a ******* door,
Shivered there as I felt the chill
In the long, dark corridor.

A voice said ‘Come!’ and I wandered in
To an office of oak and teak,
The air was heavy with sandalwood
And I waited for him to speak.
He shuffled the papers on his desk
And his eyes flashed red, like fire,
‘You’ve been a driver for thirty years,
Perhaps it’s time to retire?’

My heart dropped into my boots at that,
I babbled that I was fine,
I couldn’t retire for ten more years
If it pleased, I’d do my time.
He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips
And I shook in my shoes with dread,
‘We’ll have to give you an easier route
On The Circle Line, instead.’

I’d heard bad things of the Circle Line
That the drivers didn’t last,
I’d seen so many that came and went
On The Circle Line in the past.
‘That’s it, it’s either The Circle Line
Or…’  (the rest he left unsaid),
I thanked him quickly and turned to leave,
Relieved of my former dread.

The lift shot down to the basement where
There waited a ******* bus,
A tall conductor approached me then:
‘I see that you’re joining us!’
I took my seat and I drove it out,
The conductor pointed the way,
‘There’s only twenty-one stops to make,
Just twenty-one stops today!’

We made a stop at the hospital
And the staff there loaded two,
Then carried on to the city jail
Where a man’s parole was due,
They seemed subdued when they climbed aboard
And nobody even spoke,
Each face was pale as they held the rail,
They seemed to be anxious folk.

The route was finished within the hour
And I said to the man, ‘Now where?’
He pointed out a lake on the map,
‘We’re dropping them all down there.’
I drove us into a quarry that
Was sitting beside the lake,
And found a monstrous entranceway
To a cave, he said, ‘Now brake!’

A light was dancing, there in the cave,
Was flickering light and dark,
I said, ‘Is that a fire in there?’
He answered, ‘Merely a spark!’
He pushed the passengers off the bus
And led them into the cave,
To those that tried to resist, he said,
‘It’s a better place than the grave!’

The panic hit me as panic does
When you get a glimpse of the truth,
I may be old but I catch on fast,
Not like when I was a youth.
The bus I drove had a seven up
In front of the sign, as well,
And then I knew that the Circle Line
Was the Seventh Circle of Hell!’

I took the bus in a squealing turn
And I drove right out of the pit,
I left that tall conductor behind
For he was just part of it.
I dropped the bus in the nearby lake
And I walked back home to the wife,
A job’s a job, but I’d rather take
A little bit more of life.

David Lewis Paget

He hadn’t been home a day before
He found that his wife had died,
The doctor said it was sudden, that
There was something wrong inside.
He couldn’t be more specific till
The autopsy was done,
He’d have to wait for a week for that,
‘It’s the same for everyone.’

He went on back to an empty home
And then he gave way to grief,
It wasn’t as if he had a friend
To offer him some relief,
He’d been away on the ocean swell
On a ***** from Amsterdam,
For six months out of eleven when
He should have been home, with Pam.

A sailor’s life is a lonely life
He had known that from the start,
He possibly shouldn’t have taken a wife
When they’d be so far apart,
For seven years they had worked it out
And his wife had said she’d cope,
But loneliness is a dreadful thing
When you’re living your life in hope.

He’d loved her well and she loved him too
In their sentimental way,
She’d managed to hide her tears each time
That his ship had sailed away,
But once he had seen the autopsy
It had torn him quite apart.
It seems his wife had despaired of dreams
And died of a broken heart.

He didn’t go back to sea at once
But he hung around in bars
And managed to get himself so drunk
That all he could see was stars,
He thought his grief would diminish as
The days had turned into years,
But love for him didn’t finish, it
Just seemed to work in reverse.

He even took down her pictures, and
He locked them all in a drawer,
He didn’t want the reminder of
What he had lost before,
But life is a game of chances and
It never will be denied,
He met a nurse when he found her purse
And something lit up inside.

It seemed her job was a lot like his
She was always working shifts,
They met whenever they could, and he
Found he was buying gifts,
He went away on a ***** again
But just one month at a time,
And she was waiting when he returned
Like a welcome carafe of wine.

He spent some time at the cemetery
To honour his wife, his Pam,
And she asked if she could come along
To which he had said, ‘You can.’
He wed the girl in the early Spring
And he found a job ashore,
And swore he’d never go back to sea,
She couldn’t have loved him more.

David Lewis Paget

I’d always thought that books were the same,
There wasn’t a lot to choose,
They each seep slowly into your brain
With knowledge you can’t refuse,
But then a book I found on a shelf
All ***** and dark and dank,
I’d read so far, then turning the page
I’d find every page was blank.

The print will stay till I drop my eyes
And the book slips from my grasp,
Then every page that’s ahead is blank
As the book escapes my clasp.
The villain smirks as I lose the plot
And he changes what’s to be,
He struggles up from the printed page
In an effort to be free.

I read the book on a cliff top verge
Looking down along the coast,
The day was calm like a soothing balm
And I felt as warm as toast,
My eyelids, heavy as lead dropped down
Preparatory to sleep,
When someone scaling the cliff ahead
Called out, began to weep.

‘God help me, sir, or I’ll fall below,
On that pile of jagged rocks,
Reach out for me and don’t let me go,
You don’t look the type that mocks.’
I noticed then that I’d dropped the book
In a pool of mud, and rank,
It fell agape with a broken back
The following pages blank.

‘I have to ask how your tale will end,
It’s unfinished in the book,
Your villainous deeds go on, and then
Disappear each time I look.’
‘It ends any way you want it to,
It’s the tale without an end,
For you are the villain in the book
You can do what you intend.’

I stood up straight and I kicked on out
At the figure on the cliff,
And he fell back with a scream, a shout
To the rocks along the reef,
I turned to pick up the broken book
Wiped the pages free from mud,
There wasn’t a single page left blank
Each page was stained with blood.

David Lewis Paget

I probably failed to like the man
For he went with my ex-wife,
I hated the way she called him Stan,
As if he was hers for life.
They’d both been playing away from home
For a year, so said his ex,
I only heard from the grapevine bird
In a message of plain text.

‘Your wife’s been seeing my husband for
A year now,’ said the note,
‘If you’d like to know all the details
I can give them, creed and rote.’
I wandered round to the place she said
And she ushered me inside,
She said she wouldn’t have bothered me
But suffered from wounded pride.

It seemed that they had been meeting
Every time I was away,
My job as a travelling salesman
Kept me on the road each day.
I’d be away for a week or more
But I thought that things were fine,
She didn’t say that she’d let him play
With the things I thought were mine.

I couldn’t believe he’d cheat on her,
When I looked at the wife of Stan,
She said that her name was Isabel
As she reached and squeezed my hand,
I thought that her face was beautiful
Though it bore the lines of stress,
She said she wanted revenge on them,
I couldn’t have wanted less.

She said that she knew their routine, they
Would dine at the Globe Hotel,
Then go ahead and they’d book a room
At the neighbouring Motel,
I said I knew what we had to do
And we came up with a plan,
‘I think we’ll go and surprise them,
My wife and your husband Stan.’

We waited until they took their seats
At a table set for two,
Then wandered in and we said:
‘We’ll take this table, next to you.’
I’d never seen such spluttering, and
Each face turned beetroot red,
So then I kissed his wife, and turned
To Jane to say, ‘You’re dead!’

I’d only kissed her for effect
To see what Stan would do,
His face suffused with a jealous rage,
And Jane was jealous too,
It’s since that day we’ve made a match
Both I and Isabel,
Which goes to show that a fair exchange
Can sometimes turn out well.

David Lewis Paget

Down in the lower farmer’s field
Was an old style gypsy camp,
The wagons drawn in a circle,
Each one lit with a paraffin lamp,
And there in the centre of them all
A bonfire burned all night,
The flames would leap and the shadows creep
In a sort of mystic flight.

I’d watch from a grove of elder trees
As the gypsies sang and danced,
The girls would swirl their skirts to tease
As they whirled around and pranced,
Their arms were covered with bangles and
Their fingers, bright with rings,
Would flash at night in the firelight
As the shadows gave them wings.

Most of the girls were young, but there
Was a single one, my age,
Who danced with grace in an open space
She was on a separate page,
Her hair was black as a raven, and
Her lips the colour of blood,
My heart was stilled, it was almost chilled
By the view, from where I stood.

Her eyes were dark, they were almost black
Her hue the colour of sand,
I thought that it might be natural
Or perhaps her skin was tanned,
But as if she read my thoughts one day
She had twirled her dress up high,
And that same bright golden colour rose,
Ran up each fabulous thigh.

Then I saw her at the village fair
In the Fortune Teller’s booth,
I paid my money to go in there
And I found her name was Ruth,
She gazed deep into her crystal ball
And I saw her start to flush,
I said, ‘and what can you see in there,’
When the flush became a blush.

‘I’ve never seen such a thing before,’
She said, her eyes cast low,
‘I cannot tell you your fortune now,
So sir, you will have to go.’
She rose and pushed me out of the tent
But I gazed into her eyes,
And saw the future of my intent
In her look of blank surprise.

I went again and she read the cards
Wouldn’t touch the crystal ball,
She said, ‘there’s something very strange
In the way the cards will fall.’
I blurted out that I loved her hair
That I’d watched her from afar,
She smiled and said, I would turn her head,
‘I had wondered who you are.’

Then we stood together in that booth
And I stole a single kiss,
She fell into my arms, and cried,
‘I could not imagine this.
But the crystal ball, it never lies
And the cards have joined us too,’
She gave me one of her gypsy sighs,
Said, ‘What are we going to do?’

David Lewis Paget

He sat in his favourite corner,
Each day, just taking his pills,
The old man, Frederick Horner
Counting his cash and paying his bills,
They watched and noted his every move,
Took note of each sign of life,
He’d outlived both of his daughters,
And even his scheming wife.

He never revealed how old he was
And nobody knew the truth,
He said he was old as Methusaleh,
Remembered the Biblical Ruth,
He still had the very first dollar he’d earned
Had framed it, and locked in his drawer,
But now he had multi-billions,
And each day added more.

‘You’d think he would give us some,’ they said,
His sons, Nathaniel and George,
For they had to work for their daily bread,
And Nathaniel slaved at a forge.
‘He can’t live forever,’ George opined
‘And then it will pass to us,’
The money was always on George’s mind,
As he drove the local bus.

‘We’re not getting younger,’ Nathaniel said,
‘I’m forty and you’re forty-two,
We could have made good if he’d shown some trust,
But look at our Becky and Sue.
They both died young, of neglect they said,
And mother, she died from the shakes,
But he goes on, he’s just about dead,
It must be those pills he takes.’

They’d watched him taking his yellow pills,
He never said what they did,
The blue, kept under the windowsill,
The orange, the old man hid.
‘It must be them that keep him alive,
The orange, the yellow and blue,
What if we take the pills away?’
‘You can, but it’s up to you.’

‘Maybe we ought to try them first,
They could give us both long life.’
‘They didn’t do much for her,’ said George,
‘The old man’s second wife.’
Nathaniel nodded and looked quite grim
He remembered the yellow pills,
Spilling out of the woman’s hand
When she fell down, deadly ill.

They’d never been close to their father when
Their mother suddenly died,
Whenever there was an argument
They’d taken their mother’s side,
The old man sat in his corner and
Would mutter of stains and blood,
Would wait for a glimmer of light to shine
But doubted they understood.

‘We’ll try the blue, one pill apiece
One night when he’s in his bed,’
And so they did, they swallowed them down
In seconds they fell down dead.
The old man grinned in his final breath,
‘Too curious, those two,
They should have asked who their father was
For it wasn’t me… I knew!’

David Lewis Paget

He laid no claim to a perfect life,
Nor looked to a higher power,
‘He lived his life,’ said his seventh wife
‘At a hundred miles an hour.’
And those he bruised as he hurtled by
Were the first in defending him,
‘He didn’t live by our man-made rules
But those he defined within.’

There were some that said he was selfish,
And some that said he was cruel,
Those with the backward collar he
Devoured, and used as fuel.
He couldn’t stomach the hypocrite,
The ones that would have you pray,
‘If there is a god, I’ll give you the nod,
You wouldn’t be here today.’

There wasn’t a woman could tame him down
Not a concubine, nor a wife,
He wore out many an eiderdown
In living a lustful life.
He lived as the rest of us should live
In a type of joyful surge,
And carried us all along with him
With our inhibitions purged.

He set a pace that would burn him out
As his strength and youth declined,
But railed and ranted against the force
That made him a prey to time.
‘I’ll not give in, it would be a sin
To deny in my final breath,
A life that’s sailed too close to the rail,
That’s an ignominious death.’

He swore that he’d find a way to show
That death only set you free,
As he laid his head on that final bed,
Here’s what he said to me:
‘Just watch that picture over the hearth
Of me, when the world was young,
I’ll make it fall from the chimney wall
If the sting of my death’s undone.’

And so he died in his earthly pride
Then went to his funeral pyre,
I told my wife, ‘there’s another life
Devoured in the flames and fire.’
I didn’t believe that he could survive
On the strength of his will alone,
But went away to the wake that day
They held in his childhood home.

His friends were milling about the house
And drinking his cellar dry,
While I stood pensive before the hearth
And asking the question, why?
When a sudden crash on the cobbled hearth
Saw his picture fall from the wall,
The shattered glass from his grinning face
Went showering over all.

It must have been a coincidence
I said, and the wife agreed,
‘We’ll have to go to the cemetery
To prove that he’s there, indeed.’
We waited just on a week to go,
It rained, and the grave was soaked,
But pouring out from his headstone there
Was a plume of Holy Smoke!

David Lewis Paget

We had lain back in the meadow
Looking up to see the stars,
They were clustered all together
We were trying to find ours,
For we each had picked a single star
Up in the sky so high,
Then I rolled around to face you
And I found your naked thigh.

They were not among the brightest stars
Up in the sky that night,
But they shone on down upon us
With a pale and pinkish light,
And I wondered why the astral ray
Was pink, and nothing less,
When I realised, reflected was
The tint of naked flesh.

For your dress, it lay unbuttoned,
Was flung open, side to side,
There was nothing left uncovered,
Not your body, nor your pride,
You had never let me see your
Secret places there before,
But you whispered, ‘take me gently,
You may enter at the core.’

Now there wasn’t but a single inch
Of you but gave me bliss,
Not an inch of pulsing womanhood
I felt I couldn't kiss,
From your ankles to your calves and up
Along each silky thigh,
To that tiny sacred wilderness
That opened to the sky.

I have tasted balm from heaven
From your ankles to your breast,
For your love is all encompassing
I’d not expected less,
And I thank the lord for giving joy
When stars above us shine,
For giving life to womanhood,
And for his grand design.

David Lewis Paget

There wasn’t a lot of the Castle left,
A couple of Towers, and Keep,
Most of the walls had fallen in
To a courtyard, full of sheep.
It stood up high on a Scottish hill
Now all enclosed by a farm,
But once there was always blue-blood there,
Brought in by its Highland charm.

It ruled all over the countryside
That it mastered, looking down,
Bolstered by the power of a Laird
With a royal court and a clown,
The Laird was a noble, Ralph McClair,
And his wife, a Lady Ann,
A beauty brought from the Western Isles
But from quite a different clan.

The clown was a kinsman, Rod McBain
Who’d been held from a local feud,
At court he’d been made to entertain
For the peace that his kinsmen sued.
They never ceased to humiliate
McBain for his royal blood,
And dressed him in bells and motley there,
Simply because they could.

From what one knows, as the story goes
When McClair rode far and wide,
Taxing the poorest peasants there
For the sake of his royal pride,
It came one day he returned, they say,
To discover his Lady Ann,
In flagrante delicto in
The arms of a naked man.

The man just happened to be McBain
Who was seized, and his features spoiled,
They ripped the flesh from his back and dropped
Him into a cask of oil,
The oil was heated to boiling point
Till his screams rang out, and loud,
While she was naked, paraded there
In front of the courtyard crowd.

His screams and cries and the lady’s sighs
Ate into the castle walls,
And that they say is the only way
To explain the stonework falls,
A fungus grew in the mortar there
And destroyed the Castle McClair,
And as I say, if you go today
You will see the result right there.

For up on that distant Scottish height
You will see the remains of love,
Especially when the Northern Lights
Light up the sky from above,
For stones still fall from the Towers and Keep,
At night, and in winter rain,
And crash down into the courtyard, but
Sounding like screams of pain.

David Lewis Paget

I’d only been gone for a moment,
A moment was all that it took,
And up to the edge of that moment
I’d been sitting, and reading a book,
Then I looked up and saw you were staring,
But your eyes were glazed over, I see,
And I swear you weren’t looking, but glaring
At something you hated in me.

Then the room began twisting and turning
To the sound of the storm’s rapid roar,
As it went racing up to the ceiling,
And dived in a twirl to the floor,
It snatched at the book I’d been reading
And it flung it straight up in the air,
On the cover it said ‘Time is Bleeding’,
And I thought, ‘I don’t want to go there.’

Still you clung to your chair, my Miranda,
While the furniture skittered and slid,
Some had headed out to the veranda
Where the glockenspiel lay on its lid,
But your face and your skin became older,
As the years yet to come hurried by,
And the air in the room became colder
When I heard, ‘You’re much younger than I.’

And that’s when I felt it receding,
That eddying moment of time,
That had shown me the love that was bleeding
It hadn’t been yours, it was mine,
I sheltered there on the veranda
From the clinical glance of your gaze,
For time was against you, Miranda,
And it showed, in a myriad ways.

I’d only been gone for a moment,
A moment was all that it took,
And up to the edge of that moment
I’d been sitting, and reading a book,
Then the storm battered in through the shutters,
And it snatched at the book in my hand,
But you’d gone, slipped away down the gutters
With all I had loved in the land.

David Lewis Paget

The building had to be as it was
Before, when it first was built,
So the Inspector said to me,
I was mortgaged up to the hilt,
We’d already changed some minor things
They’d stand, he said, in the way,
We couldn’t move in till they were changed
Reversed, to our mute dismay.

He ******* the permit into his hat
And clamped it down on his head,
‘Where are we going to sleep tonight?’
‘That’s not my fault,’ he said.
He’d locked us out of our only home
With it only half rebuilt,
Then driven off as he sneered and coughed,
‘Are you trying to feed me guilt?’

We’d lodged our plans seven months before
To rebuild a nest of rooms,
The Council never got round to it
So they left us mired in gloom,
We couldn’t wait for their paperwork
So we just got on, and ‘did’,
We toiled by night in the after light,
In the day, just lay and hid.

Then when the paperwork finally came
It covered a room too short,
They charged full odds for their office clods
But for plans, their worth was nought.
Back he came on a day of shame
To demand we tear it down,
That extra room that had fed our gloom
So I said, ‘You go to town!’

I handed over a hefty pick
And I said, ‘It’s up to you.
I wouldn’t touch it myself,’ I said,
‘But you do what you must do.’
I didn’t tell him of Cranston Leigh,
The ghost of that room out there,
I should have said, but then Cranston’s dead
So the end result was fair.

He laid about him with pick and axe
And he tumbled half a wall,
Before first hearing the screech from Hell
That was Cranston’s warning call.
I saw the Inspector’s hair rise up
Like an early crop of rye,
And that was even before the ghost
Screeched out, ‘You’re gonna die!’

I’ll never forget the scene that night
The Inspector burst in flames,
While Cranston, from the unholy dead
Leapt in and out of our drains,
That room still stands, it’s unfinished still
The Inspector will not call,
We left a poster of Cranston Leigh
As a Welcome, out on the wall.

David Lewis Paget

She saw her friend on the Monday,
At the fountain, by the square,
Her skin had seemed to be glowing
With the sunlight on her hair.
She said, ‘What’s happened to you, my girl,
There’s an incandescent glow
That emanates from your features,’
And her friend said, ‘You should know!’

They met again on the Tuesday,
At a Café near the Strand,
Her friend sat next to a pale-faced guy
Who reached to hold her hand.
‘So this is your little secret,
You’re a deep one, aren’t you, Eve?
You could at least introduce us then!’
She said, ‘Oh, this is Steve!’

She missed her train on the Wednesday,
But she heard from near and far,
‘Eve has got her another guy
And he writes, and plays guitar.
We wonder how long this one will last
For she’s not been true before,
Eve likes a bit of variety,
She’s sure to show him the door.’

They passed in the street on Thursday,
And stopped for a bit of chat,
‘He says he’s writing me summer skies,’
And Steve was this, and that.
‘Everything seems to be brighter now
There’s bluebirds up in the sky,
I feel that I’m tripping on a cloud,
I never felt so high.’

She noticed the breeze on Friday,
Was as soft as featherdown,
When Eve had texted her love for him
From the other side of town.
‘Whatever he writes for me is done
In the twinking of an eye,
But I’m starting to feel so restless, for
At best, he’s a boring guy.’

She happened to see, on Saturday,
Her friend at the local ball,
And looked for the poet Steve, but he
Didn’t appear at all.
Though Eve was dancing with someone new
While thunder rolled in the west,
‘I cast him off, but he’s there for you
If you want him, be my guest!’

The lightning flashed on the Sunday,
And Eve was soaked to the skin,
She beat on the door of Janet’s place,
‘For God’s sake, let me in!’
Her hair was hanging in rats tails and
She cried, ‘I’m really scared.
Steve is writing a storm for me
For he said, he’d really cared.’

The storm had gone on the Monday,
The clouds were fluffy and white,
As Janet walked to the corner store
And Eve came into sight.
Eve said, ‘What’s happened to you, my girl,
There’s an incandescent glow
That emanates from your features,’
And her friend said, ‘You should know!’

David Lewis Paget

‘Time is a perfect circle
Where it ends, it curves back in,
Starting a whole new cycle
Where the other one begins,
We cannot escape our futures, nor
Much less, escape our past,
The things that we’ve run away from
Will be waiting there, at last.’

That’s what he said to Jennifer
As she packed her final case,
And carried it out to the taxi,
‘I don’t want to leave a trace!
I’m parcelling up the memories
That I shared so long with you,
And dropping them off at the station,
Locked forever, on platform two.’

And Derek had looked forsaken as
She passed out through the door,
She’d said their love was mistaken
It had gone, forevermore.
‘Don’t look, enquire, or ask for me
Or you’ll still be waiting yet,
The one thing that will stay with me
Is that I wish we’d never met.’

And so she passed on out of his life
A marriage of thirteen years,
A time of strife with a testy wife
And a basketful of tears,
He tried to cling to the better times
That were fading in his head,
He only knew that he loved her still,
Though he wished that he was dead.

When Jennifer rode away that day
She had thought, ‘At last, I’m free!
I’m going to live my life the way
That I hoped my life would be.’
She thought of her husband’s final words
As his heart began to rend,
‘Just know that I love you, Jennifer,
I’ll be with you in the end.’

She moved to a whole new neighborhood
And she spurned her former friends,
Went with a whole new clique of folk
Who had never made amends,
There wasn’t a single married pair,
They were all divorced, or spent,
Adrift in the dim-lit bars like her
In search of what life meant.

But when the news of his passing came
She was pensive for a while,
She planned to go to his funeral
And forgot for a day to smile,
He hadn’t been able to countenance
A life where his love had gone,
And left a note with a single quote,
‘I’d best be moving on!’

She drifted on for a few more years
In her false, gay party hat,
With nobody there to wipe her tears
As he’d done, when times were flat,
When time brought on some dread disease
And she knew that her time was spent,
Whose hand would pay for her funeral,
Not one, and nobody went.

They had to open her husband’s grave
That he’d paid in the years before,
When life for him had been content
‘Til death do us part,’ he swore,
And as her coffin was laid on his
In that dismal outback track,
It was then I heard but a whispered word,
‘I knew you’d be coming back!’

David Lewis Paget

He sat in the Bell & Lantern with
His pipe and with his beer,
The streets were wet on a misty night
With the pub, the only cheer,
He’d only married the month before
To a girl, not half his age,
And laid it out like a written law,
‘You must make a living wage.’

He said that he’d been disabled by
A burst of cannon shot,
Unleashed by one of the Frenchmen
On his sloop, ‘The Camelot’
He said that he’d done his duty by
His country and the King,
So she would have to support them both
By doing anything.

She wondered what he had meant at first
But soon was disabused,
When he ripped open her bodice, saying
‘What you’ve got, you’ll use.
There’s sailors down at the docks each night
Who’ve been at sea too long,
They’ll pay for a bit of comfort, girl,
I want you to be strong.’

He chose the most of her wardrobe and
He threw away her drawers,
He said, ‘Whenever you greet one, you say,
‘What is mine, is yours.’
He chose a long cotton dress, he said
Was much more like a shift,
‘You have to be more than available,
It’s easier to lift.’

He wouldn’t be moved by the tears she shed,
How much she would implore,
His eyes were hard as her feelings bled,
His word would be the law,
He sent her out as the moon rose up
With its faint reflected light,
‘Make sure you bring all the money back
When you’re finished for the night.’

She wandered along dark alleyways
And she saw their shadow shapes,
Standing by darkened buildings, some
With caps and some with capes,
Their eyes would follow her down the lanes
Until just one would shout,
‘Now there’s the prettiest dolly bird,
What are you doing out?’

She’d soon get used to the smell of them,
Tobacco, gin and beer,
They’d come in close for a feel of her,
She’d try to hide her fear,
They’d ask how much for a little touch
She would say a shilling down,
If they were more of a gentleman
She would ask for half a crown.

Most of them took her standing up
With her dress up to her waist,
Or bent her over a barrel, it
Depended all on taste,
She’d work right through to the midnight hour
It depended on the trade,
He’d ask in the Bell & Lantern just
How often she’d been laid.

A good night, often she’d bring a pound
That he’d put down on the bar,
And pay for a round of drinks for mates
And for her, a *** or jar,
She’d blush and sit in the corner while
They’d leer and peer and joke,
The bolder ones would approach him, ask
‘How much for a friendly poke?’

He’d say, ‘She’s my little money box,
It will cost you half a quid,
But you must be nice, she’s sugar and spice
And she’ll tell me what you did.’
Then one might lay his money down, say
I’m feeling like a ride,
While he would laugh at his other half,
‘You can take the girl outside.’

One night when out on the dockyard she
Looked bleakly up at the stars,
And saw the Moon through the mist and gloom
Sitting right next to Mars,
So back at the Bell & Lantern she
Picked up and shattered a glass,
Lunged up, and ****** it into his face,
With Mars in her eyes, at last.

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

She kept the jar on the mantelpiece,
Our Grandma, Eleanor Flood,
A plain ceramic with just one flaw
A cross that was scrawled in blood.
We didn’t know what she kept in there,
We’d ask, but she’d never tell,
She merely said if we opened it
Our souls would go straight to hell.

It sat forever above the hearth
And stared at us as we ate,
My sister said it was filled with earth
Scraped up from somebody’s grate.
I thought it might hold a pile of coins
Of Spanish Dollars and gold,
I’d read so much about gold doubloons
In pirate stories of old.

But Grandma Eleanor pursed her lips
Each time that we asked her why,
We couldn’t look and we couldn’t touch,
She’d sit, and stare at the sky.
‘You vex me, child,’ she would often say,
‘You’d tempt the devil to tire,
Your parents left me to care for you,
The day they died in the fire.’

She used that story to shut us up,
She knew to pile on the guilt,
She made us pay for each bite and sup
By shaming us to the hilt.
She made it seem like a deadly chore
To have to cater for us,
‘My life,’ she said, ‘should have been much more,
Not that I like to fuss.’

We’d often ask about Grandpa Joe,
Ask what had happened to him?
Her eyes would turn to a fiery glow,
‘He died in a state of sin.’
She wouldn’t tell us what he had done,
What got her into a state,
We looked for signs that she’d loved him once,
But all that we saw was hate.

The house was heated from down below
A furnace under the floor,
I’d have to feed it with coal and coke
I’d bring from the coal house store.
She’d make me empty the pale grey ash
And scatter it on the stones,
Out in the garden, by the trash,
And next to a heap of bones.

She said that Grandpa had kept a dog,
And fed it on butchers bones,
Then threw them out by the fallen log
And next to the pathway stones.
My sister said they were burned and black
And like they’d been in a fire,
We wouldn’t have dared to answer back
Or call our Grandma a liar.

One day, while dusting the mantelpiece
The jar had crashed, and it burst,
The sound of shattering porcelain
Drowned out our Grandmother’s curse.
For spilling out of the broken jar
Was a pile of ash in the light,
And sitting there was a skull as well,
Along with the ash, bleached white.

Then Grandma let out a weird wail
And fell, to kneel on the floor,
She stared, and the skull was staring back
To tear at her cold heart’s core.
‘Why have you come to haunt and stare,’
She cried, then toppled and fell,
Down on her face as her heart gave out,
Sending her soul to hell.

Two jars now sit on the mantelpiece
Of Joe and Eleanor Flood,
A matching pair, and each with a cross
I carefully smeared with blood.
I shovelled her through the furnace door
And later, raked out the ash,
While now there’s a growing pile of bones
In the garden, next to the trash.

David Lewis Paget

What will I miss the most, I thought,
Now that she’s not around,
I walked back slowly to the Port
With my face turned to the ground,
Would I miss the incessant chatter that
Would drive St. Peter mad?
Or sit with a sigh of pure relief
At the absence of it… Sad!

And what of the silly songs she sang
When I often used to curse,
Telling her that she’d got it wrong,
Forgotten the second verse,
For then she would just ignore me
And go out and feed the birds,
Singing the same old song again
But making up the words.

I’d ask her to wear the blue dress
So she’d go and wear the green,
The one that had such a diving top
That her cleavage was obscene,
She’d only do it to thwart we when
We’d visit with my kin,
Annoying my strait-laced mother,
‘How on earth do you keep them in?’

She was just the size of a hobbit, or
A tiny little sprite,
Would lie with her back towards me
When we cuddled up at night,
Those were the things that I would miss
I thought, with just a tear,
Why did she have to leave me at
The turning of the year?

Christmas never would be the same,
She’d decorate the tree,
Getting the lights a-blinking which
Was more than they did for me,
I entered the door at home, and listened,
Nary a single sound,
And never would be again, now she
Was planted in the ground.

David Lewis Paget

There was sadness in his towering form
As he walked the windswept beach,
The clouds were louring overhead
And the **** cast up was deep,
He had to walk where the tide came in
On a narrow strip of sand,
And darting surges caught at his feet
With their floating contraband.

The wreck of the ancient ‘Neptune Glyph’
Embedded in drift was there,
Huddled under a looming cliff
With a trace of its last despair,
But rust had eaten its plates away
To the sound of the wheelhouse bell,
Where a Master and his daughter lay
‘Til the ship became a shell.

But now he skirted the rusting ship
And he seemed to hear her voice,
The daughter, in her personal hell,
She’d been given little choice:
‘Why did you take me out to sea
To avoid my mother’s plan,
She’d said that we would be leaving you
For you’re such a brutal man!’

Then a rumble grew in the rusting hulk
As the wind caught at the stern,
Rattling through the throat of a man
With a sound like someone burned,
‘I had to keep your mother from you
For she’s such an evil witch,
But she sewed a spell for a rising swell
And added the final stitch.’

The man on the beach could hear the roar
That rose from the rusted shell,
Of a storm that raged in the world before
And hurried them both to hell.
‘Why did you have to take the life
Of the mother that might have been?’
He cried aloud at the rusting shroud,
‘I’m left adrift in a dream!’

A voice replied in a rising scream
Then died away to a croak,
‘I raised the storm, but I didn’t mean
For my daughter dear to choke…’
The man turned back on the way he came
And left with a parting tear,
As a woman up on the headland watched
Him fade, and disappear!

David Lewis Paget

I paced the floor by the tavern door
In the hopes she’d come my way,
She didn’t know that I’d still be there
For I hadn’t said I’d stay,
We’d parted there on a bitter note
On a dark and moonless night,
I’d told her I wouldn’t marry her,
But now, I thought, I might.

I’d filled my head with the pros and cons
And the pros had come up short,
I’d have to steady and settle down
And that was my major thought.
I’d been so free that it seemed to me
I’d be hoist on a single hook,
Why would I trade a library
For the sake of a single book?

But then I began to doubt myself
As her scent came wafting through,
That scent of fire with the name ‘Desire’
That she’d said, ‘I wore for you!’
I’d pressed my lips to her silken throat
And I’d felt my power surge,
As she lay back and surrendered to
Some overwhelming urge.

Where would I find her likes again,
I paced, and bit at my lip,
We’d courted then since I don’t know when,
She’d said, ‘we’re joined at the hip.’
But then I’d panicked and almost ran
I could see my freedoms gone,
‘If you don’t ask me, there’s them that will!’
Like a fool I said, ‘So long!’

I knew that she’d seen Montgomery,
He’d eyed her off at the ball,
And set up a wager, he to me,
He’d be first to see her fall.
She’d left that night in a coach and four
With him riding close behind,
While I’d returned to the tavern then
And drank til my eyes were blind.

I heard he was going to propose that night
And the thought had made me sick,
I’d have to make a decision now
And I’d have to make it quick.
I saddled Sally, the old grey mare
And I whipped her out the yard,
For Cauter Hall was at Risdon Weir
And I’d have to ride it hard.

We caught the coach at the meadow rise
And we passed it on the fly,
They must have seen a demon rider
And horse against the sky,
My cloak flew out as the wind blew up
On the road at Walker’s Flat,
And somewhere there in the cold night air
I lost my only hat.

We skirted the ground at Risdon Weir
And we splashed on through the Ford,
The lights of the mansion grew more clear
As we galloped to Cauter Hall,
Her hooves a-clatter on cobblestones
I leapt from the horse’s back,
And beat on the ancient cedar door
In a frontal, forced attack.

Montgomery stood in the passage there
And he turned to her to shout,
I raced on in with a sense of sin,
With a punch, I laid him out.
Catherine came from an ante-room
And she said, ‘How dare you do…’
But I went down on my knees to her,
‘I’m here for marrying you!’

She seemed surprised, then her laughing eyes
She tried to hide with a fan,
‘I knew that you’d come around one day
If you saw me play with a man.
I’ll take you dear, but I’ll make it clear
That my guest was never the one,
We never marry our cousins here…’
Then I knew that I’d been done!

David Lewis Paget

‘I’ve never believed in ghosts,’ she said,
So I said, ‘I’ll prove there are.
I’ve seen them at night beside our bed,
I caught one sat in our car.
They wander along the street outside
I’ve seen them down at the beach,
You have to believe to see them, though,
They tend to be out of reach.’

‘You’ll have to produce one here for me
Before I’m going to believe,
It’s easy to say that they exist
If you just want to deceive.’
She effectively threw the gauntlet down
So I just had to respond,
And work on a way to bring one here
From out the back of beyond.

But where do you go to find a ghost?
It’s easier said than done,
I’ve seen so many of them, but most
Won’t answer to anyone.
I thought I’d try to Google one up
When turning my PC on,
Then took a sip from my coffee cup
While typing in ‘Ghost - just one.’

It threw up a series of single ghosts,
The one that walked in the rain,
And one that came with its head cut off,
A ghost in a railway train.
It even mentioned the woman in white
Who came halfway down the stair,
And stood by the bannister and groaned
With blood still thick in her hair.

I liked the thought of a railway train
With its own original ghost,
She didn’t seem to be in much pain
So she appealed to me most.
I sent a message for meeting me where
She could come and meet the wife,
And bring the train, to give her a scare
That would last the rest of her life.

That night we lay in our poster bed
And I heard the shriek of wheels,
The wife rolled over as in it sped
The room was filled with her squeals.
The train pulled up by the bedroom door
And the ghost approached our bed,
She wore a nightdress, down to the floor
With bullet holes in her head.

‘I’ve never believed in ghosts,’ she’d said,
She’d have to believe them now,
The ghost approached with a look of dread,
And it caused a terrible row.
‘Don’t ever bring ghosts in here again
Or you’ll be alone in the bed,’
As the train took off with a clicketty-clack
And the ghost just stood and bled.

I’m never allowed to Google up,
She said to stick to my verse,
They sit in the kitchen, while we sup
And even pass in the hearse,
She says that she never sees them now,
She doesn’t want to believe,
I know it would only cause a row
If I said they tug at her sleeve.

David Lewis Paget

They say it’s been empty for quite some time,
But I’ve seen a flickering torch,
Late at night when the moon is bright
The light is red on the porch.
And shadows move by the hedgerows there
Like spectres that flit in the night,
The door will creak as the seekers seek,
While the blinds are pulled down tight.

And something creaks where the attic peaks
It could be a number of things,
A flutter of leaves, the wind in the eaves
Or the sound of some old bed springs.
The neighbours hide and they stay inside
When the Moon comes up on the rise,
They say no way can the children play,
It would be a blot on their eyes.

For Elspeth comes as the sun goes down
In a skirt as short as can be,
With fishnet tights in both blacks and whites,
They say she’s brewing the tea.
Perhaps they’re playing Canasta there
Or playing for poker chips,
They may be dancing the night away,
She sure has a dancer’s hips.

Whatever it is they do in there
I’ll have to go in to find,
The state of play that they do each day
At Numero sixty-nine.
I’ll stay nonplussed till I get it sussed,
I wonder what it could be?
It’s just my luck, if I go to look,
I’ll catch her brewing the tea.

David Lewis Paget

They often walked in the garden, though
The garden was such a mess,
It was overgrown with Ivy, and
Choked up with watercress,
The pond was overflowing its banks
At the wet time of the year,
But no-one tended the garden then
It was much too hard to clear.

The house was old and the walls were damp
It had been a fine estate,
Built up from scratch by the pioneers
Then left to my schoolboy mate,
And now he was nearing twenty-five
And he had Germaine in tow,
I’d thought I could win her heart from him
But I had no place to go.

We lived, we three, in the house where we
Could each survive on our own,
While keeping the others company
Though not quite living alone,
So Paul lived up on the West Wing floor,
Germaine set up in the East,
While I had a couple of rooms downstairs,
In truth, I counted the least.

I stayed away from the garden when
I saw a snake in the pond,
More of a giant serpent that was
Six foot long, and beyond,
I didn’t caution the other two
For some strange quirk of my own,
For Paul would walk on the pondward side
While she would wander alone.

I heard her scream as the serpent came
Slithering up from the pool,
My blood ran cold as it struck at Paul,
He was much too close, the fool.
It bit, he said, on the hand and leg
It struck so fast, and had flown,
Then he called out in a chilling shout,
‘Its fangs went through to the bone!’

We carried him up in a faint that day
The venom was coursing his veins,
I must admit I was glad of it
For I only thought of Germaine.
She saw me stare at her auburn hair
And she must have known, before,
I’d been so very obsessed with her
But she only thought of Paul.

He lay in a fever there for days,
I thought that he might just die,
But felt ashamed of the thoughts that came,
My friendship caught in a lie,
If only she could have come to me
I could truly call him friend,
But she was true, and it seemed I knew
She would nurse him to the end.

One day she came, he was not the same,
She said, in a tortured tone,
‘His skin is starting to scale,’ she said,
‘He wants to be left alone.
His eyes have turned into tiny slits
And he seems to slither in bed,
His fangs are longer and sharper now
Than ever I’ve seen,’ she said.

I had to go, to see for myself,
I noticed his skin was grey,
His eyes were shifty, flickered about,
I didn’t know what to say,
He licked his lips but his tongue was forked
As if he’d split it in two,
His lips drew back and his fangs slid out,
‘What do I want with you?’

‘I’ve never seen such a change,’ I said,
‘How much of what’s left is Paul?’
He reared up in the bed at that
And flattened against the wall,
I felt that he was about to strike
So I left the room in a rush,
And told Germaine, ‘We had better leave,
Or it might mean the end of us.’

She stuck with Paul to the very end
I think that I knew she would,
They found her lying beside the pond
With her face suffused with blood.
Her skin looked just like a dragon’s scales
Her eyes pinpoints, if at all,
They killed two snakes in the garden pond,
There was nobody there called Paul.

David Lewis Paget

You didn’t tell me, when I found you
That you were the Witch of Dreams,
You conjured spells in your afternoons
Of many and varied scenes.
When late at night put the sun to flight
And the moon rose over the hill,
You’d lie in bed, and you’d lay your head
In the dreams you are dreaming still.

You’d fill my head with colours and dread,
With your images light and dark,
And take my hand on a stretch of sand,
Or dance in a Faery Park,
I never knew if the scenes were you
Or spells, raised up in the mist,
With a goblin, elf, or your own sweet self,
And lips that I’d never kissed.

Your scenes float over the cyber seas
And come to rest in my head,
They take my words from a grim disease
That I may have written or read,
You conjure scenes that are lost in time
And you bring them back to my eyes,
Then I recall, with the tears that fall,
Each love, its time and demise.

Your dreams will ever bewitch me, girl,
Your scenes will tug at my heart,
Whatever spells are in store for me
You’ll send, though we are apart.
We neither dwell in the real world
In truth, for we’ve never met,
But surely, you are the Witch of Dreams
As sure as your name’s Jeanette.

David Lewis Paget

It floated ashore one pitch black night
We hadn’t seen it before,
All covered in barnacles and scale
Cast up from a distant war,
It gently rolled as the tide came in
And hit the rocks with a ‘clang’,
Then settled down as its scuppers cleared
The decks, all covered in sand.

The conning tower was an evil sight
Its paint was peeling away,
Ribbons of black, as camouflage
Peeled off in the light of day,
And there we could see the *******
Look down with an evil leer,
As once it looked on its victims when
It ruled in a sea of fear.

The storm that had brought it to the shore
Took far too long to abate,
It raged and roared for a week before
We’d take the risk on its plate,
But then we found that the rust had hid
All access into its gloom,
We walked the whole of its length but found
No way to enter the tomb.

There must have been twenty men inside
Or what was left of their bones,
But all I’d hear when the night was clear
Was a chorus of shrieks and moans.
We smashed the hatch in the conning tower
And a sailor ventured in,
We hauled him out in a quarter hour
But his mind was wandering.

I saw some movement deep in the hull
And I called out, ‘Who goes there?’
But then a guttural German voice
Had answered, in despair,
‘Stay well away from the conning tower
It’s a type of evil well,
Once within you are caught in sin
And you’ll find yourself in Hell.’

The sea rose up and covered the rocks
And it floated off the sub,
While all the bones in their shrieks and moans
Screamed ‘Mercy’ - there’s the rub,
They called for mercy they never gave
When they sank each helpless crew,
Now roam forever beneath the waves
In a sub, now sunken too.

David Lewis Paget

The trees are dry, have a withered look
And the wheat has gone to seed,
The skies are grey on a summer’s day
And the river’s filled with ****,
The brook that babbled is sad and still
And the sea lies flat beside,
A lonely shore that had offered more
Till the day the poet died.

Gone is the sound of merriment
And the party jokes fall flat,
The folk just wander aimlessly
As they turn to this and that,
The traffic’s down to a sullen crawl
As the lights turn red beside,
And silence falls like a dreadful pall
Since the day the poet died.

The colours leach from the neon signs
And they turn a pavement grey,
There is no yellow or green chartreuse
To be seen since that dreadful day,
The liquor’s flat as a pieman’s hat
And you can’t get drunk, they sighed,
The children say they will run away
Now they know that the poet died.

And love has curdled in every heart
It was captured in his verse,
The sweet young bride has been left outside
Where no bells ring, which is worse,
The Moon at night is without its light
That it once would shine outside,
And lovers look for its beam in vain
Since the day that the poet died.

There is no poetry left in life
That was back in another time,
When the poet cursed as he wove his verse
And he sprinkled it well with rhyme,
But it’s sad to say, now he’s gone away
We must learn to feel inside,
And colour our world a different way,
Now that the poet’s died.

David Lewis Paget

We’d picked up the cottage for peanuts, as
It sat on the edge of a wood,
The air was damp and we used a lamp,
No power in that neighbourhood,
But the sun came filtering in through the leaves
On the pleasant summer days,
It was like we were living a hundred years
In the past, using former ways.

We carried our water in from a well
That sat just outside the door,
We had to lower a wooden pail
And it slopped all over the floor,
But Meredith laughed, and said it was fun,
She felt like a pioneer,
‘I’m getting to know how things were done
In the neck of the woods, round here.’

We fired the stove and the hearth with wood,
Gathered among the trees,
For branches fell, in the storms as well
When the wind was more than a breeze,
I chopped it up on a wooden block
And carted it all inside,
To see it stacked by the kitchen clock
Gave me a sense of pride.

Upstairs was a single bedroom with
An attic room beside,
The walls were covered with wallpaper
From a distant time and tide,
The bedroom was an ocean blue
And the attic was painted green,
I said to Meredith, ‘Shield your eyes,
It’s the brightest thing I’ve seen.’

The damp had got in the attic wall
And the paint had started to rot,
Up in one of the corners you
Could see a slight fungus spot,
But we didn’t need the room just then
So I said, ‘Just let it be.
I’ll find the time to attend to it
When the rest has set me free.’

But Meredith’s sister came to stay
So we had to use the room,
We turned it into a bedroom with
A flick of a whisking broom.
Rhiannon was a beauty, I’ll
Admit that she took my breath,
So young, and with her life unsung
And yet she was close to death.

She’d been and slept in the Green Room
For a week, or maybe more,
When she said, ‘I fell, and I feel unwell,’
Then she coughed up blood on the floor.
So Meredith was distraught, and thought
She’d sleep at her sister’s side,
But early the following morning she
Then told me her sister died.

She stayed with her sister’s body there,
She said it was like a tomb,
And soon my Meredith coughed up blood,
She said ‘It’s an evil room!’
A doctor came with the ambulance
And looked at the flaking mould,
Then said, ‘I think it’s the paint, my dear,
I’ve heard of this stuff of old.’

He scraped it then, and he tested it
And he came back round to see,
‘You know that paint’s full of arsenic,
There’s a well known history.’
And life was never the same for us
When we sat in the cottage gloom,
I could always hear Rhiannon’s cough
Up in that attic room.

While Meredith put the blame on me
Packed up her things and left,
She said that I should have scraped it off,
Then left me, feeling bereft,
She’d lost her sister, and I lost her
So I sit alone in the gloom,
My heart has stopped like a ticking clock,
And the cottage, now, is a tomb.

David Lewis Paget

‘What are we going to do with you?’
My parents would say to me,
‘We want you to work in a banking house,
But you write poetry.
You may look back on a wasted life
If that was all you did,
You need to steady, and take a wife
So you’ll need to make a quid.’

While I, in all of my innocence
Would look at them, askance,
‘If life were just about money, then
I think I’d rather dance.
I don’t believe that it’s all about
The grind, amassing wealth,
I cast my fate to the winds, let that
Take care of it, itself.’

I needed to be creative so
I scribbled, more and more,
Composing the perfect poems that
Did not exist before,
They didn’t earn me a single quid
But that was not the plan,
A part of me will be left behind
Once I am done with man.

And so I tell the Millennials
Don’t waste your time with sweat,
But add something to your culture that
Has not been written yet,
Whether your art is writing, music,
Painting, poetry,
The question, ‘What will you do with you?’
In time, will set you free.

David Lewis Paget

The office was in a building that
You wouldn’t have looked at twice,
In truth, it stood in a part of town
That wasn’t very nice,
The blinds forever were drawn down tight
And were thick with stains and dust,
I wouldn’t have sought a job in there
But I felt that I really must.

I was over a year on welfare, and
I knew that it had to end,
I’d lost all my self-respect, my car,
And I hadn’t a single friend,
When this came up in a tiny ad
On the supermarket board:
‘Be one of the Movers and Shakers,
Then put the Takers to the sword.’

My curiosity peaked, and I
Marched into the office grim,
An insipid girl was behind the desk,
‘You’ll have to talk to him!’
A man in an inner office sat
In a cloak and black cravat,
‘We’re needing another numbers man,
Do you think you’re up to that?’

I said I was up to anything
For I didn’t really see,
That there would be ramifications
And they would apply to me,
He showed me into an office with
A desk and a swivel chair,
Then pulling a ledger off the shelf
He set it before me, there.

‘Your job is to add up the columns
Putting a total to each name,
Remember, you’re only the numbers man
So you’re really not to blame.
Then when you get to five hundred, tear
The page from out of the book,
A man will be round to collect it,
Let’s just say, he’s Dr. Hook.’

I didn’t meet this mysterious man
‘Til I tallied up more than three,
A Johnson, Sands, and an Adamson,
And a man called Jacoby,
They’d totalled just five hundred each
When I tore their pages out,
And Dr. Hook slid them into a book,
I said, ‘What’s it all about?’

‘Never you mind, my lad,’ he said,
‘It’s better you didn’t know,
There are things that shouldn’t bother your head
Until it’s your time to go.’
But those names remained in my mind until
On watching the nightly news,
An Adamson died in a mighty wreck
And a Sands, from a faulty fuse.

I thought it might be a coincidence
And I put my mind at rest,
When the girl from work came visiting,
And she seemed to be distressed,
I’d thought that she was insipid, but
There was fire in her belly too,
‘You know that the guy whose place you took
Is dead…  So I’m warning you!’

She said that I had a page as well
In a book, kept under her desk,
‘If you saw your column, adding up,
I think you’d get little rest.
For every page you give Dr. Hook
I add ten each to your name,
With that score of ten, you’ll be just like Ben,
He lasted a year in the game!’

‘He’d started fudging the figures when
His number was creeping up,
I’d warned him, like I am warning you,
But it wasn’t ever enough,
An audit pushed him over the top
By adding a hundred points,
And the ten he’d skimmed then died with him
In that fire at the Pizza joint.’

My column is stuck, four-eighty-nine
At this moment, as I write,
I still believe I can fend it off
If I’m careful, keep it tight,
I sweat, while adding the figures up
Of a certain Dr. Hook,
His column tops five hundred and one
As I tear his page from the book.

David Lewis Paget

He trudged on up from the great seaport
After a year at sea,
And in his mind was a single thought,
That thought was Emily.
He’d got her note when he disembarked
In the pouring, driving rain,
And read it under a single spark:
‘You may never come here again!’

‘Never come here again,’ it said,
What was that meant to mean?
The blood had rushed to his sailor’s head,
He conjured a nightmare scene,
He thought of the tidy garden path,
Of seeing a man at the door,
And Emily hiding behind his hat,
A man he’d not seen before.

Perhaps the year was too long to wait,
She hated it on her own,
He’d often suffered a lack of faith
That she could remain alone.
He’d conjured visions in distant ports
At the curious lack of mail,
While he had written his deepest thoughts
To post them before he sailed.

He’d thought of her at the village dance,
He’d thought of her down the street,
And meeting a friendly guy, perchance
Who would sweep her off her feet.
While he had suffered temptations too
At the taverns along the way,
The sparkling eyes of the barmaids there
When the ship put in for a stay.

But now he trudged in the driving rain
At that terrible time of night,
When shadows loomed to increase the gloom
That he felt, with never a light.
He’d struck a match when he’d read the note
But it fizzled in record time,
He’d only read when the match went out
The first, not the second line.

He felt his way up the garden path
And he paused, then knocked at the door,
His heart was there in his mouth at last
To the tread of a man, for sure.
The door swung open, a man stood there
A quizzical look in his eyes,
‘We didn’t expect you here so late,
But still, what a nice suprise.’

The sailor stood, was taken aback,
He hadn’t the words to say,
‘What have you done with Emily,’
His breath was taken away.
‘Your Emily’s moved, she went next door,
I see she’s burning a light,
You’d better get home, you’re living there,
She’s waiting for you tonight.’

David Lewis Paget

My Uncle John was a woebegone
In the all out way of things,
Wherever he went, no sun had shone
And we all were ding-a-lings.

He had no time for the hoi poloi
Or women who rant and tweet,
He’d pick on their saddest attributes
When he said they had ugly feet.

But those that he hated most were men
With money, and stick-out ears,
He said they could overhear him when
He whispered to privateers.

When I was a boy, I looked for joy
But he only gave me grief,
He’d say a bloke with a silly joke
Was simply a petty thief.

He’d never praise original thought
He’d say that it sounded dumb,
His wife Elaine said he’d still complain
As long as he sat on his ***.

She once cooked him a glorious meal
He muttered, and spat it out,
So Aunt Elaine said, ‘it’s such a shame,
I thought it might give him gout.’

I have to tell it was just as well,
He came to a terrible end,
He fell right back with a heart attack
When somebody called him ‘friend.’

We planted a bed of chrysanthemums
On his plot in the cemetery,
It gives him something to ***** about
When the cats go there to ***.

David Lewis Paget