Way out, on what was a barren plain
A tree has taken root,
Over the spot where a poet’s lain
It bears the strangest fruit,
He wasn’t read while he lived and wrote,
Was neglected till he died,
But scribbled each verse like a private note
That he hugged to him in pride.

He lived in a garret, quite alone
And without a loving mate,
His heart would leap at each lovely girl
As she passed his garden gate,
But far too shy to invite them in
He could only sit and stare,
And think each time of what could have been
If he’d chanced to step out there.

But love still flowed from his poet’s pen
Though he had no-one to care,
He captured it from the universe
And he wrote it everywhere,
He left it piled in his gloomy den
When he took sick of the ride,
Turned his eyes to heaven again,
Gave up the ghost, and died.

They didn’t know what to do with it,
This love from a poet’s pen,
So placed it in the coffin with him
These shallow, heartless men,
Buried him out on a barren plain
Where nothing ever grew,
But marked the spot by planting there
A tree, namely, a Yew.

It’s twenty years since poetry was
Planted there, unread,
Alongside in the coffin with
The poet, newly dead,
But on the tree that proudly stands
With its roots entwined in love,
Each leaf reveals a verse or two
Fluttering from above.

David Lewis Paget

It started late on a Sunday night,
The sudden rattle of pans,
With nobody in the kitchen then,
‘What’s happening, Dianne?’
Dianne went pale and she looked at me
‘You’d better go down and see,
Maybe we have an intruder there,
Just keep him away from me.’

I went, but nobody there of course,
I didn’t think there was,
But two large knives on the cupboard were
Arranged in a sort of cross,
‘Didn’t you put the knives away,’
I called, but she was there,
Looking over my shoulder and
I saw that she was scared.

‘But I haven’t used those knives for days,
There’s something going on,
Somebody must have sneaked in here,
I tell you, this is wrong!’
I turned and I tried to comfort her,
‘There’s no-one in here now,
Just someone playing a crazy trick,
I’ll catch them out, somehow.’

But late that night, in the early hours
The bed began to shake,
Dianne woke up and she grabbed at me,
‘I think it’s a real earthquake.’
I tumbled onto the floor at that,
But the floor was still and sound,
Only the bed was shaking, quaking,
Just above the ground.

And that was only the start of it,
Strange things went on for weeks,
For things would fly off the table and
Plates off the mantlepiece.
A carving knife pinned me to the wall
By the collar of my shirt,
‘I don’t think somebody likes you,’ said
Dianne, ‘you might get hurt.’

Dianne had an ancient father who
Was mean as the day was young,
He hated me, and I used to say,
‘How did he stay unhung?’
We rarely went off to visit him
As he acted like a skunk,
But Dianne dragged me along at times
To show a united front.

Doors were slamming and windows cracking
So Dianne had to shout,
‘We have to visit my father, Dean,
It’s time that we went out.’
I ventured cautiously through his room
And called the old boy’s name,
But it was quieter than the tomb
And Dianne said the same.

We found him out in the laundry then,
He’d fallen in the tub,
Had gone a couple of spin cycles,
Oh yes, and here’s the rub,
One bony arm and a hand were out
And pointed, looking mean,
We knew then who was the poltergeist,
But boy, his bones were clean.

David Lewis Paget

We lived right up on a grassy bluff
That looked down on the sea,
In a tiny cottage, fit for two,
Just Arabelle and me.
But Arabelle was a wistful wraith
Insubstantial in the flesh,
She hovered around in her ghostlike way
With an air of faint distress.

The surrounding air was turbulent
For it always seemed to blow,
Over the top of the bluff from depths
Down in the cove below,
But Arabelle was restless in
Even the faintest breeze,
Worse when the wind came surging up
And swaying the tops of trees.

‘Why do you let it get to you,
Why are you so forlorn?’
Often I’d say, as Arabelle
Would sit hunched up, at dawn.
‘I can detect a spirit there
That tumbles from out my breath,
That’s where the wind is coming from,
It’s a portent of death.’

Then she’d begin to gasp for air
As if she couldn’t breathe,
I’d say, ‘there’s plenty of air out there,
It rattles around the eaves,’
I’d take her hand and I’d lead her out
Walking along the bluff,
While she took many a gulp of air
Until she had had enough.

She died quite early one Sunday when
The wind had clattered outside,
I found her slumped on the grassy bluff
From watching the rising tide,
But now, there’s only a gentle breeze
Since I’ve been living alone,
I only hear the clattering gale
When visiting her headstone.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

She was always saying she’d **** me,
Was violent in word and in act,
But a heart of gold, so her friends have told,
They say it as if it’s a fact.
But they’d never had to live with her,
And often, I think it’s true,
That you only know what’s in somebody’s soul
Whenever you have, or you do.

They thought her the life of the party,
All giggles and kicking up heels,
When we were alone, she’d curse and she’d moan,
Just ask me, I know how it feels.
She’d slander each friendship behind their back,
While they were left thinking it fine,
I didn’t care much for the friends she’d attack,
But then she’d get stuck into mine.

They’d not see her tempers and tantrums,
Weren’t there with her stamping her feet.
I’d heard it said she was good in bed,
She’d wrap herself up in a sheet.
She gave out that she was broadminded
Would flash both her cleavage and thighs,
But never at home, when we were alone,
She’d do it for all other guys.

I never could do a thing right for her
She held me in bitter contempt,
While I’d try to raise her, to lift and to praise her,
She’d just say that I was unkempt.
I took her one day for a picnic lunch,
We sat at the top of a cliff,
The weather was balmy, I thought it would calm me,
It did, but her manner was stiff.

She soon resurrected an argument
I thought that was over and done,
My mind was quite hazy, but she was stone crazy,
And soon she had started to run.
I stood at the edge of the towering cliff
With her charging at me, and how!
She came in a rush, but she missed in her push
Or I wouldn’t be writing this now.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

There’s something wrong, for I see it now
Burn brightly in my brain,
A simple spark and a flash of light
That becomes a roaring flame,
It happens just about every night
As I rest my weary head,
And burns my eyes from the insides, when
I’m lying still in bed.

The doctors say it’s a trick of light
At the corner of my eyes,
Perhaps it’s only a lightning flash
That catches, by surprise,
But there’s no light in my darkened room
And the blinds are pulled down tight,
It comes so suddenly, then it goes
Like a spark of some insight.

Could it be something that’s been and gone
Though I’ve blacked the memory out,
Something terrible, that went wrong
And scared me, without doubt?
Could it be something that’s still to come
Said the gypsy in the hall,
While crossing her palm with silver, as
She peered in her crystal ball.

‘It could be a warning from the gods,
It could be a sign of fate,
Some sort of a premonition that
You attended to, too late,
The crystal ball has a fiery glow
In its depths, that I never saw,
And many’s the time I’ve gazed in it
Not seeing such glow before.’

I never would worry Christabel
With my tale of the nightly flame,
I wouldn’t have wanted her to think
There was something wrong with my brain,
So she went and ordered her wedding dress
A vision in silk and lace,
And yards and yards of a satin trail
With net all over her face.

We took our vows in the Baptist church
She’d attended since a child,
Keeping her mother happy, though
In fact, she was meek and mild,
Then later at the reception we
Arrived at the old church hall,
And Christabel was a vision as
She stood by the entrance wall.

There’s no way I could foresee it
Though I later thought that I should,
A guest came in with a cigarette,
I’d have stopped him if I could,
He flicked the **** and a single spark
Flew onto my darling's train,
The silk and satin went up at once
And Christabel was aflame.

The flames went up like a giant torch
And engulfed the yards of net,
There wasn’t time for a single word
If there was, then I forget,
She stood there blackened, her skin peeled off
And she swayed against the wall,
Then slowly toppled to earth before
I reached, to stay her fall.

Now every night there’s a single spark
And a sudden flash of light,
As flames are dancing behind my eyes
In that awful nightmare sight,
The tears that roll down my cheeks are hot
As if roasted in the fire,
They might as well, for I dwell in hell
Since I lost my one desire.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

The Press surrounded the boarding house
That was kept by Mary Toft,
Her sailor man was Rickety Dan
Who was hidden, up in the loft.
‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’
Cried the head of the Press Gang crew,
We’ve got you a berth on the frigate ‘Perth’,
‘Don’t make us come looking for you!’

Mary stood by the door and blocked,
‘You’ll not be coming in here,
You can’t Impress in a private house,
The law of the land is clear.’
‘But this is a plain old ***** House
It’s the Navy’s right to come in,
You don’t say no to a guinea or so
From a sailor, looking for sin.’

‘I’ll have you know it’s a Boarding House
Not a ***** House, Oh dear!
You’d better go off for a pint of gin
And swill it around in your ear!
A Boarding House is a private house
And protected, under the law,
You’d better go looking somewhere else,
Like ‘The Angel’, down at the shore.’

‘We’re here to pick up Rickety Dan
We know that he’s here with you,
There’s no protection since Bony came
And the Navy’s short of a crew,
So stand aside, by the rising tide
He’ll be lost to you, Miss Toft,
For somewhere out by the channel ports
He’ll be clambering up, aloft.’

Dan had rickets when he was young
His legs were bowed like a bell,
He heard the door come clattering in
And he heard young Mary yell;
He seized his favourite capstan-bar
And he leapt right out of the loft,
Then laid about him from right to left
In defence of his Mary Toft.

The Press consisted of Isaac Raines
A farmer, plucked from the hay,
A weaver, minus the broken frames
The Luddites had taken away,
A shipwright, also a ropemaker
Who had joined to avoid the Press,
‘As long as you bring them in, my lads,
I’ll not let you go for less!’

Dan lashed out with the capstan-bar
And he laid the weaver low,
Sent the farmer to tend his fields
With only a single blow,
Chased the shipwright out of the door
Where the ropemaker had fled,
Knocked the Lieutenant down to the floor,
Then saw that he lay, stone dead!

‘I’m gone, I’m gone,’ said Rickety Dan,
‘I’d better head back to the sea,
It’s bad enough that I’ve killed the man
They’ll all be looking for me,
I’ll go and sign on an Indiaman
If I have to sign as a cook,
Once I’m safely away at sea
It’s the last place that they’ll look.’

She never saw Rickety Dan again
Though she’d wait at the turning tide,
Whenever an Indiaman came in
She would dress herself as a bride,
And even after they’d left this life
With Dan no longer aloft,
A bird perched up on the mizzen mast
Would look out for Mary Toft.

David Lewis Paget

‘The time has come,’ he heard them say
Outside his tiny cell,
‘Go in and get the beast to pray
To save his soul from Hell.’
The Priest then walked up to the bars
And stated his intent,
‘Will you confess at last, my son?
Will you, at last, repent?’

‘The only thing that I repent,’
The prisoner said at last,
While staring at the Priestly face
At length, through double glass,
‘Is how your justice operates,
Your Judge sits on his bench,
Determines guilt before the trial
And brooks no argument.’

‘You have been tried by twelve and true
Your jurors had their say,
Condemned you as a murderer
Before they walked away.’
‘They would have found me innocent
Had he not been precise,
And sent them back to change their view,
Not only once, but twice.’

‘The law’s the law,’ the Priest replied,
‘The verdict said it’s you,
You had your day in court, and now
You’ll have to pay your due.’
‘I’m innocent,’ the prisoner said,
‘I swear it before God!’
‘Take not his name in vain, my son,
It’s time to reck his rod.’

‘Your God is just an ornament
To keep us fools in check,
If he were real, he’d swoop on down
And break the Judge’s neck.
The only God is in my heart
And he knows everything,
He welcomes us, the innocent,
Hypocrisy is sin.’

‘You risk your soul,’ the priest replied,
‘So hold your tongue in check,
For soon it will be silenced as
The rope, it breaks your neck.’
‘How many Nuns have you despoiled,
How many children died,
How many now lie buried, spread
Across the countryside?’

‘You hide behind your surplice, and
Your cassock and your gown,
You say you represent him, but
In fact, you put him down.
You tie us up with ritual
And steal our Peter’s Pence,
Then hide your sins by making all
The laity repent.’

‘I’ve had enough,’ the Priest replied,
Then turned and stepped aside,
The gaolers tied his hands and feet
And shuffled him outside,
They dragged him to the gallows and
Put on the dreaded hood,
But still he called, ‘Repent yourself,
Oh Priest! You know you should!’

It barely took a minute for
The rope and then the drop,
And then just twenty seconds for
His beating heart to stop,
The Priest’s thin hands had trembled
As he walked out in the cold,
And prayed, not for the prisoner,
But for his own poor soul.

His sins lay heavy on him as
He walked up to the nave,
Then knelt before the altar asking
God, his soul to save,
But God was strangely silent
And the Priest had felt like dross,
The morning saw him hanging
From the altar’s Holy Cross.

David Lewis Paget

He was leaning against the wall, backed up
And staring through fumes of gin and whiskey,
Glaring at all the toffs, dressed up
And ravelling through his sordid history.

But never a sense of ‘us’ with him
He was more like a raging arcane animal,
Caught and caged, as they looked right in
To poke and pry at his painted trammel.

Oils and charcoals, water colours,
Pinned like an insect by their gazing,
Pointing fingers would **** his skin
Pick through his pockets, grinning, gaping.

What would they know of his woods and fields,
The towering oak, or the dew at dawning?
Only the light that a lamp post yields
In the mean streets when the world is yawning.

Theirs was a world of tile and brick
Of diesel fumes and the rail line snaking,
His were the hills of hay and rick
The tumbledown cot and the farmer, raking.

‘What did you bring me here to spill?’
He said to the shyster gallery owner,
‘There’s nothing you couldn’t print at will
With a Laser print, and a barrel of toner.’

‘They’re coming in hordes to see your myth,
You’re a breath of air in a jaded Autumn,
A genuine Primitive, Jordan Griff,
I lured them in, and your work has caught them.’

But Jordan scowled and he curled his lip
As the crowd milled using an unknown language,
‘I’d rather be down at the ‘Rope and Skip’
With a pint of ale and a cold meat sandwich!’

‘You’re really an artist?’ said the woman
Who stood at his shoulder, pale and shaking,
‘I like the one at the farmer’s gate
With the girl, head bowed, as her heart is breaking.’

Griff looked deep in the woman’s eyes
For the chord she’d struck was his secret mourning,
‘How did you know?’ He’d sobered up,
‘I was the girl your paint was born in!’

Jordan halted his glass, mid-sip,
He seized her hand as his heart was pacing,
‘Years have slipped between cup and lip,
I’d give them all for a second tasting!’

He led her into a lumber room
And she locked the door as they pulled apart,
Then found some cushions and in the gloom
They lay on the floor there, making art.

That’s how his Primitives came to start
With a joy not there at his god-rot dawning,
A horse and cart with his palette heart,
And a tousled woman each tumbledown morning!

David Lewis Paget

I’d see strange lights in the garden shed
When I’d wake in the early hours,
Hanging out of the bedroom window,
Blowing smoke at the stars,
I wasn’t allowed to smoke inside
So I’d hang out over the sill,
Whenever I’d wake at three o’clock
With the world so quiet and still.

Light would stream from a dozen cracks
Where the timber didn’t fit,
The beams would light up the garden beds
With the rest of the patch unlit.
I’d listen hard for a movement there
But without the bedroom light,
Though nothing stirred in the shed out there
But the silence of the night.

To tell the truth I was just too scared
To go down and investigate,
The lights went off at four o’clock
On the dot, and never late,
I’d wait a while and go back to bed
But I very rarely slept,
While Constance lay with her back to me
As her innocence was kept.

I didn’t tell her about the lights
Or admit that I sneaked a smoke,
She’d simply say that I drank too much
Or get mad, when she awoke,
But I checked the shed in the morning light
And opened the creaking door,
There were just a few old gardening tools
And a broken down lawnmower.

One night, I slept much longer than most
And I woke at half-past three,
But Constance wasn’t there in the bed,
She wasn’t where she should be.
I hung on out of the window then
And looked on down at the beams,
Where Constance was approaching the shed,
Asleep in her walking dreams.

She stopped, and opened the creaking door
Then she disappeared inside,
I held my breath and I lit a smoke
And a second one, beside.
I thought that she might have woken up
For the beams were still as bright,
But she only came when I called her name,
Still sleep-walking in the night.

She climbed back into our bed again
And slept the sleep of the dead,
She didn’t wake until ten o’clock,
At breakfast then, I said:
‘How did you sleep then, Constance dear,
You are somewhat flushed in the cheeks.’
She smiled a mystery smile: ‘That was
The best that I’ve slept in weeks!’

‘You didn’t get up in the night,’ I said,
‘Imagine some lights, and beams?’
‘No, I was lost in some palace, Ted,
And having the strangest dreams.
A prince sat high on a silver throne
But the air in there was a fog,
There was just the prince and myself alone,
But he had the head of a frog!’

She laughed, as never I’d heard her laugh,
And her eyes, they sparked with fun,
I couldn’t believe the change in her,
She’s never a happy one.
‘I suppose that he asked to kiss you then
Like the tale from the Brothers Grimm?’
‘Something like that,’ said Constance,
But her lips were pursed, and prim.

It happened again another night
When I woke to find her gone,
She didn’t come back at four o’clock,
Nor ‘til the sun had shone.
I stopped her as she was walking back
But her eyes were wide awake,
‘Don’t even ask,’ she said to me,
‘Or you’ll cause us both heartache.’

It’s seven long months since they went out,
The lights in the garden shed,
And Constance cries when she tries to sit,
She says it’s the baby’s head,
She told me she doesn’t want me there
When she’s finally giving birth,
So I took an axe to the garden shed
And I piled the wood on the hearth!

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

Hieronymus Bosch, who was only four,
Had toddled right out of my life,
I didn’t know whether he’d gone on his own
Or left with the trouble and strife.
She’d rave and she’d threaten to fly the coop
As she said that my ways were strange,
But whether she’d bother to take him too
Would have meant a remarkable change.

‘Why did you pick such a horrible name,’
She’d say, as she ladled the stew,
‘You gave him the name of a painter insane,’
(As he baited the bears at the zoo).
‘How can he live a commonplace life
With a moniker he can’t spell?
You’ve sentenced your son to eternal strife
Like that panel, a painting of hell.’

Hieronymus, he didn’t care about this,
He wanted to picture his world,
He’d flop and he’d slop in the mud, in his bliss,
And paint, till his toes had curled.
I knew that he’d be a surrealist when
He played with his mash, and was cute,
He swished it around on his palette to look
Like a man with a nose like a flute.

‘That kid is so gruesome,’ the wife had exclaimed,
‘He’s set on a roadway to hell.’
He’d crayoned a picture of me and her sister
Entwined on her favourite bell.
‘He isn’t like others,’ I used to exclaim,
‘He sees what he sees inside out,
He doesn’t like others, like hair-splitting mothers,’
And that’s when she started to shout.

I’ve searched and I’ve searched for Heironymus Bosch,
I’m trying to follow his trail,
The long line of beetles he captured in treacle,
The dead dog that’s eating its tail.
I know that he’s not with the trouble and strife
For she went into hiding in Greece,
He should be called Chester, the lad’s such a jester,
I guess I’ll be calling the Police.

David Lewis Paget

Driving blind through a flurry of mist
On a road beyond the glare,
I’d left the hurrying city behind
For the peace of who knows where,
There wasn’t a light on the country road
But a glimmer from the stars
Was high ahead where the road had led
To the faint red glow of Mars.

I’d had to get me away that day
Or I thought I’d go insane,
My life was sputtering in the gutter
And all it brought was pain.
I’d had my fill of the diesel fumes,
Of the cold, unloving ways,
The condescending, trivial chatter
That marked and maimed my days.

And she, the light of my underworld
With the flaming, golden hair,
Had gone with one of the chattering kind,
Had turned and left me there.
The lips that had whispered words of love
Way back, when our world was new,
Had now been pursed as my world was cursed
With her eyes, ice cold and blue.

My headlights, dim on the road ahead
Formed a short and rounded arc,
I couldn’t peer past my inner fear
That my road ahead was dark.
The wind blew up and the rain came down
And it burst across the screen,
I couldn’t see twenty yards ahead
So I questioned what I’d seen.

A sudden flash on the roadside there
Of a figure draped in rags,
That flapped and fluttered about his form,
A hat with a brim that sagged,
A paltry second I’d seen him there
Then gone, as the car swept by,
I sat in shock, and was taking stock,
Should I stop and help the guy?

I’d travelled almost a mile before
My conscience had got to me,
Then turned around and retraced the ground
Where I thought he’d surely be.
He stood alone in his flapping rags
As I turned the car around,
Glistening wet on the darkened road
He stood, not making a sound.

He wouldn’t sit in the front with me
But sat in the back, and sighed,
‘It’s awful wet on the road tonight,
I thought that you’d like a ride.’
I saw him nod in the mirror then,
He just inclined his head,
But then I saw that his eyes were gone
And I felt a creeping dread.

The things that I thought were rags I saw
Were feathers, tightly sewn,
The feathers of some black, evil bird
That had once both soared and flown.
‘I’m heading North, I can drop you off,
But you’ll need to tell me when.’
He mumbled something I couldn’t hear
And, ‘I won’t tell you again!’

His voice sent shivers all down my spine
For it croaked, just like a crow,
Rumbling up from some deep pit
Nightmares and phantoms know.
I kept one eye on the mirror then
As the sweat formed on my brow,
He seemed to sense I was more than tense,
‘You mustn’t be worried now.’

‘I’m leading you to a future that
You’d possibly never find,
I wouldn’t normally help you, but
You stopped, and were more than kind.’
He said to turn on a track ahead
And I did, but didn’t know why,
Then saw a glimmer of light ahead,
The flames reached up to the sky.

A house was burning, the upper floor
Was bathed in an eerie glow,
I jumped on out of the car and went
To scour the floor below,
A girl lay pale on the kitchen floor
And I scooped her up where she lay,
Carried her out to the waiting car
As she woke, in a mute dismay.

The figure stood in the pouring rain
And rustled his feathered cape,
‘Your future lies in your own hands now,
The past is yours to escape.
Be strong and true, it will come to you
That you’ll never have to atone,’
His feathers fluttered, and then he flew,
Leaving us there alone.

When people ask how we came to meet
I always let out a groan,
While Amity says, ‘That’s a subject
That we think’s best left alone.’
We might tell them of the burning house,
How I scooped her up from the floor,
But never mention the raggedy man,
His flight, or the clothes he wore.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

‘If only she hadn’t turned,’ he said,
‘The bread and the bacon burned,
It wouldn’t have made me jump,’ he said,
‘Knock over the butter churn.
Her petticoat was caught in the grate
With coals caught fast in the lace,
And that’s when the skirt went up,’ he said,
‘The flames in her lovely face.’

He carried her into the garden where
The rainwater barrel stood,
And tipped her into the chilling depths
Where the fungus ate at the wood,
The barrel hissed as she thrashed about
Came spluttering up to see,
Was anything left of her golden hair
Or aught of her modesty?

‘I saw the tender length of her thigh
Where charring parted her skirt,
The flames had burned so far and so high
Her cheeks were covered with dirt,
Her hair in tails was stuck to her face
Her bodice unlaced and wide,
I helped her out as best as I could,
She asked if I’d looked… I lied!’

‘That tiny scar you see on her brow
Is all that’s left of the day
Her petticoat was caught in the grate
Before I whisked her away.
I couldn’t wait until she was dry
To ask for her dripping hand,’
She said, ‘Oh well, I knew you were sly,
You looked at my contraband!’

David Lewis Paget

They put me in charge of the churchyard,
And said, ‘mow between the graves,’
The weeds out there were atrocious
Grew in lumps, and clumps and waves,
They tangled up in the mower blades
And they shut the motor down,
So I had to use the garden shears
As I knelt upon the ground.

They covered some of the headstones, so
I had to rake them clear,
Spent half of my time sat reading them,
The date, the time of year,
The ground had given away on some,
Had fallen into a hole,
Wherever the coffin lids had caved
On some benighted soul.

The nights were coming on early so
I laboured into the dark,
Just by the light of a spirit lamp
That I’d borrowed from the park,
At length I came on a sunken grave
And I pulled the weeds aside,
To see the shape of a bony hand,
With the shock, I almost died.

The hand came up through the stoney earth
And it pointed to the sky,
With no flesh left on the fingers, yet
It seemed to question ‘Why?’
It still belonged to the corpse below
But had tried to get away,
Out of the dark of doom and gloom
And into the light of day.

The name on the grave was ‘Clarabelle’
And, ’She of the evil eye,
She hexed the cattle in Fingal’s Dell
And the swine, while passing by,
They hung her high on a willow tree
When she pointed at Belle Raye,
Who choked, then withered and sighed, was dead,
And all in a single day.’

The hand had twitched, I couldn’t resist
As I sat and watched it there,
I reached on out and I seized the wrist
And I felt some strange despair,
The hand was warm, and was then full-fleshed
As a shape rose from the ground,
That held me tight in the darkening light
With the hand that I had found.

I heard the rattle of death as she
Had tried to clear each lung,
Full of the body’s liquid waste
That had formed when she was hung.
I heard a croak, and the words she spoke
As she glared into my face,
‘I might be saved from my early grave,
But you’ll have to take my place.’

Whatever power it was she had
It dissolved and turned to sand,
The moment I pulled away from her
And I let go of her hand.
She didn’t speak, but let out a shriek
As she slid back in the grave,
So I’ll never know if she heard below:
‘You’re much too bad to save!’

David Lewis Paget

He hadn’t lived in the world of men
Since he’d tossed his job, and quit,
He’d told his boss, ‘There’s no future here
And so, here’s an end of it!’
The grimy city was getting him down
And the noise was driving him spare,
So he said goodbye to the world of fumes
To head for the open air.

He found a tumbledown cottage that
Nobody seemed to own,
The roof was keeping the weather out
So he thought to call it home.
He cobbled together some furniture,
A bench and a rustic chair,
And sat in the shade of the eucalypts,
And bagged the occasional hare.

The cottage was back off an ancient track
Unsealed, and long out of use,
The nearest cottage a mile away
In a similar state of abuse,
The pioneers had been and gone
Leaving just these standing stones,
A testament to a rugged life,
They were now just piles of bones.

Though at first the silence suited him
It would give him time to think,
He would lie at night awake and cite
That the sky was made of ink,
An ink shot through with pinpricks so
That the stars came shining through,
And feel, as the Autumn dampness fell
On his face as morning dew.

But Autumn shivered to Winter and
It would rain and pour for days,
He’d look on out to the distance where
All he could see was haze,
He’d keep a fire in the ancient hearth
With wood, when it wasn’t wet,
And curse himself for short-sightedness
When it was, or he’d forget.

Then his hearing tuned to the many sounds
That he’d missed before in the bush,
The slightest sound of a twig that cracked
Or a breath of wind, at a push,
He heard the echo of silences
That whispered over the plains,
A spirit stirred that he’d never heard
Before, in his city pains.

But someone back in the world he’d known
Was worried that he had died,
And found the tumbledown cottage where
His friend was lying inside.
He wouldn’t answer his queries when
He spoke in a human voice,
Such sounds were strange to a mind that ranged
When given a different choice.

Then the doctors came to check on him
And the police turned up en masse,
They said, ‘We’re having to take him in,
He’ll harm himself at the last.’
But he raised one hand when they closed on him
In a manner distinctly odd,
And whispered ‘Hush! If you strain you just
Might hear the voice of God!’

David Lewis Paget

I’d hidden away the mirrors
Packed them up and sent them off,
Taken the shine off the saucepan lids,
Sandpapered the coffee ***,
Everything that reflected I’d
Sand-blast, like the sliding doors,
Even got rid of the polisher
For shining the wooden floors.

It was very like narcolepsy when
She saw her face on a plate,
She’d go in a trance and sit for hours
In a crazy, dreamlike state,
I’d take away the reflection and
She’d sit and weep for hours,
‘You’ve taken away my beauty,’ she
Would say, and take cold showers.

It seemed like a terrible sickness that
She loved her looks so much,
She’d say, ‘If you won’t let me see myself,
I’ll just make do with touch,’
She’d run her fingers over her face
Explore each crease and mound,
And sigh to her satisfaction as
She felt her lips turn down.

I couldn’t get rid of the garden pool
That flowed on in from the brook,
Babbling over the standing stones
From the woods at Nether Hook,
I’d catch her kneeling beside the pool
And staring into its depths,
Smiling at each reflection that
Would ripple with every breath.

‘Beware of the evil Water Sprite,’
I told her more than once,
‘He takes advantage of lovely girls
For he hates to be outdone.
He’ll lure you into a shady pool
With guile, and his tender lies
And hold you down ‘til you surely drown,
You’ll avoid him, if you’re wise.’

She told me then of a vision that
She’d seen, that of a prince,
He’d smiled at her from the water but
She hadn’t seen him since.
‘That’s not a prince but the Water Sprite
And he’s trying to lure you down,
To put your face to the water, but
I’ve told you once, you’ll drown.’

The water was babbling gently on
A sunny day in Spring,
In shades of the weeping myrtles and
The sound of cuckooing,
Miranda was knelt beside the pool
And I saw her head go down,
When claws reached out of the water
Pulled her in, without a sound.

I raced across and I seized her hair
And I pulled her from the pool,
But claws had raked at her pretty face,
She said, ‘I feel a fool!
I should have listened to you, I know
But I thought that just one kiss…’
But he had turned to a monster and
Had bitten her rose red lips.

I put the mirrors all back in place
And I bought new shiny pans,
Polished the floor, you can see your face
But she hides behind her hands,
She never looks in a mirror now
Though her scars are healed and white,
But goes each day to poison the pool
To **** off the Water Sprite.

David Lewis Paget

Madison mounted her coal black mare
In the yard of the Smugglers Inn,
Her coat was black and her hair was fair
And her jodhpurs tucked well in,
The sky was in a threatening mood
With its thunderheads from hell,
As lightning forked on the ancient rood
And the rain teemed down as well.

‘You need to get to the Laird,’ I cried,
‘Tell him to haste to me,
Another day and she may have died,
I’m trying to set her free.
But the Pikemen stand outside her door
And they say they guard her skin,
There were locks and chains on her door before
Up there, in the Smugglers Inn.’

‘Tell him to bring his gallant troop
To dismay the Duke of Bray,
He means to imprison his daughter
In his tower, the Lady Grey,’
The Pikemen said that I’d lose my head
If I tried to breach her door,
And wouldn’t answer whenever I asked,
‘What is she locked in for?’

So Madison wheeled the mare around
And she put it to the spur,
If any could ride a horse to ground
I knew that it was her,
She headed off to the Castle Croft
Head bent to the driving rain,
With lightning flashing around her mount
I watched her across the plain.

What seemed to take forever, I thought,
Was merely an hour or two,
But then my fears were set at naught
As the troop came jangling through.
Each man had raised his sabre and
He’d kept his powder dry,
My heart was surging within me as
The troop came riding by.

And then, at last, was Madison
Still riding with the Laird,
Determined then to save her friend,
To show her that she cared.
The Pikemen soon were beaten down
Were lost in the affray,
I never did catch a glimpse of him,
Their lord, the Duke of Bray.

It took a moment to smash the locks
On the door of Lady Grey,
And all the troop had cheered out loud
As the chains, they fell away.
Madison was the first in line
To embrace the one within,
But we were not to know what lay
Up there, in the Smugglers Inn.

The Lady, held in a firm embrace
Had staggered out through the door,
But blood and pustules were on her face
Like we’d never seen before.
A dying Pikemen called, ‘You fools,
You’ve unleashed a bitter ague,
And then he sighed just before he died,
‘Behold, you have the plague!’

David Lewis Paget

The storm had unleashed its fury,
In gales, on the night before,
Had scribbled its bitter story
All over a battered shore,
For there lay the yacht ‘Imagine’,
Cast up on the outer reef,
Its sails and its stays were sagging,
And shredded beyond belief.

I scrambled over the rocks out there
When the tide left it high and dry,
In hopes that I’d find my friend, Jo Bère,
Unhurt, though I don’t know why.
Jo Bère was such a mountainous man
And so much larger than life,
He’d sailed through many a perfect storm
On board, with his restless wife.

So when I clambered aboard that day
I heard her calling my name,
And something about her pitiful cry
Said nothing would be the same.
I found her down on the cabin floor
All bruised, and somewhat distressed,
The storm had shattered the cabin door
And left the cabin a wreck.

I said to Dawn, ‘you outlived the storm,
But where is my friend, Jo Bère?’
She said, ‘He fell overboard last night,
I looked for him everywhere.’
Though she was bruised, there wasn’t a cut,
Just thrown around in the flood,
So what was the smear on the locker there,
The ominous sign of blood?

‘He must have fallen and hit his head,
I can’t remember, I swear,
The yacht was tossed and my husband lost,
He must be floating out there.’
I knew that she was a restless wife
She’d often give me the eye,
I knew their marriage had been in strife,
Could never figure out why.

But now she reached and she held my hand
And gave it a gentle squeeze,
‘My husband’s gone, but my life goes on,
I’ll always be here to please.
You must know, I’ve always cared for you,’
I said, ‘Don’t ever go there,
Because, to me, you will always be
The wife of my friend, Jo Bère.’

Her face grew dark, and I saw the spark
Of an anger, much like a storm,
She didn’t take to rejection well,
And I should have been forewarned.
I turned to leave so that I could grieve
The loss of my friend, Jo Bère,
Then saw on the floor the bloodstained axe,
With clumps of my old friend’s hair.

She leapt for it, but I got there first,
And I stamped it, down on the floor,
Then Dawn was wild, like a crazy child,
She came at me, tooth and claw.
‘I never thought you would ****** him,’
I cried, while beating her off,
She screamed, ‘You’re not going to put me in,’
And then she started to laugh.

A high pitched laugh that was like a scream
As I clambered over the side,
Just as the sea was flooding in,
Right at the turn of the tide.
She must have known that she’d have to pay
When I told them, creed and rote,
For I heard them say, the following day,
‘That woman has cut her throat.’

David Lewis Paget

He looked on down from the higher ground
At the village he held in thrall,
A gaggle of bowers, of steeples and towers
And he ruled them, overall.
They went their way each enchanted day
Unknowingly bound in his spell,
Not able to leave, to fret or to grieve
While he ruled their wishing well.

The wishing well in the village square
That had been since ancient days,
Nobody knew who put it there
Some sage with enchanted ways,
Its spirit was always known for good
Till they dragged her from a ditch,
That haggard harridan, Elsie Hood,
Known as the village witch.

They’d ducked her once in the village pond
To see if the crone would float,
Pricked her skin with many a pin
So the Witch Finder could gloat,
The sentence passed was the first and last
For a witch, in that village dell,
While some were stern, said a witch should burn,
She was tossed, head first down the well.

The well grew an ugly, creeping moss
That gave off an evil smell,
And everything good from it was lost
Some said, ‘It’s the witches spell!’
Then he had come to the village square
And tossed in a coin or two,
Said, ‘I command, let me rule the land
And the village surrounding you.’

And from that day they were cut away
From the villages all around,
Each road would twist with an evil mist
They were lost, and not to be found,
While he looked down from the higher ground
To gloat on each church and bower,
For then by stealth he had taxed their wealth
Though all that he had was power.

A maiden sat in the village square
Selling her flowers and blooms,
Each day, enchanting the people there
By night, in the Tavern’s rooms,
She caught his eye, and he breathed a sigh
When she smiled, so innocently,
So he went to tell the wishing well
‘That’s who I want, for me!’

The spirit flew from the wishing well,
The spirit of Elsie Hood,
‘I’ve done the thing that you want me to,
But now you want her, for good!’
It dragged him screaming across the square,
And tore at his eyes and skin,
His blood was spread almost everywhere
By the time that she dropped him in.

The mist has gone, it has moved along
The roads in and out are clear,
The moss dried up on the wishing well
And the girl, well she’s still here.
They filled the well to the top with sand
So no-one conjures a spell,
They’d rather be part of the greater land
Than wish in a wishing well.

David Lewis Paget

I was sitting outside the house at dawn
Having a quiet smoke,
I’m never allowed to smoke inside
And I’m just a quiet bloke,
I watched the first few friendly rays
Of the sun, rise over the town,
But then it grew dark, I watched amazed
As the sun went slowly down.

So dark, as black as a midden
And I truly felt alarmed,
Our cockerel ran in a circle, then
Fell down, was somehow charmed.
Surely the earth had not reversed,
But my senses said it had,
And when my chair went floating,
Then I knew that the news was bad.

Everything that was not tied down
Had slowly begun to rise,
Even my car and the outside bar
Hovered before my eyes,
I suddenly felt as light as air
And I had to grab a pole,
While the neighbour’s mobile home took off
And left behind a hole.

I made my way to the bedroom then,
It was doing in my head,
And there was the wife, still sound asleep
Floating above the bed,
The quilt and blankets were floating too
And I tried to hold them down,
‘I didn’t think that you cared,’ she said
As she woke, with a puzzled frown.

The problem lasted for seven hours
While we floated round inside,
I made my way to the ceiling light
And repaired the one that died.
The milk flew off from the cereal
And the toast popped up to the roof,
‘You see, the earth has reversed,’ I said,
‘If you need it, there’s the proof!’

The news was coming in fits and starts
From the station in the town,
While men were bracing beneath the desk
Just to hold the anchor down,
‘A giant comet has hit the earth
And has spun it in reverse,
They say that it’s only temporary,
Still, it could be worse.’

At midday, there was a glimmer of light
As the sun began to rise,
The furniture settled down again
And we saw familiar skies,
But the seven hours that we lost will be
Quarantined from time,
Unless we want to be rising as
The Noonday bells will chime.

And one thing that was a certainty
We’ll never trust again,
We said, ‘As sure as the sun comes up…’
But that was way back when.
And now I notice our cockerel
Can’t seem to sing a note,
Since ever its doodle-doodle-****
Came backwards from its throat.

David Lewis Paget

There were tigers, bears and elephants,
The day that the circus came,
And dwarves and clowns in our tiny town
It never would be the same.
The people stared as it passed on by
It was like a grand parade,
If only we’d known what was going down,
It was time to be afraid.

The tent went up in the open field
Behind old Barney’s store,
And lines of booths for the local youths
At a penny or so a draw,
While lines of coloured bulbs lit up
Where the fairground rides were set,
And musical hurdy-gurdies sounded
Just like a passing jet.

Then girls in flimsy bikinis flew
Up and under the top,
A giant net underneath them, yet
In case that one might drop.
The Ringmaster with his hat and whip
And his giant, curled moustache,
Kept all of the ******* riders straight
In line, and under his lash.

The elephants were herded in
And stood on their great hind legs,
Trumpeting sighs, and rolling their eyes,
Just like a dog that begs.
The clowns raced in and disrupted all
Clambering over the seats,
And roused the crowd, that laughed out loud
At all their ridiculous feats.

At ten, the tent had begun to whirl
And the audience went still,
As hounds had bounded in and around,
The Hounds of the Baskervilles.
A massive bell had begun to chime
The Ringmaster’s coat turned black,
He grew in size right before their eyes
And some had a heart attack.

He grew two horns on top of his head
That made him look like a goat,
And then a shimmering tail of dread
Slid out, from under his coat.
‘You pays yer money and takes yer choice,’
His voice boomed out in a bit,
The prayers prayed and the screamers screamed
As the floor sank into a pit.

The first three rows fell into the pit,
The rest of us stood and cowered,
While he just floated and cracked his whip
Over his pit of power.
And flames shot up from the pit below
To the chime of the Black Mass Bell,
We knew we stood at that terrible hour
By the Seventh Circle of Hell.

Our lips were sealed, and I risk my soul
And any future of grace,
By telling you all just what went down
In this, now devilish place.
You’ll see the field behind Barney’s store
Lies burnt, still black with their blood,
Where once the Devil’s own circus came
And set up in our neighbourhood.

David Lewis Paget

They’d sat beneath the sweltering sun
For an hour, or maybe two,
Lost somewhere on the Birdsville Track
They didn’t know what to do.
‘Stay with the car,’ said Derek Beech,
‘They’ll come and find us soon.’
‘Better we walk,’ said Colleen Scott,
‘Til we find that last lagoon.’

They glared and bickered, and pursed their lips,
The battlelines were drawn,
He to stay with the crippled car,
She to go wandering on.
‘The temperature’s hitting fifty C
If you go, you won’t survive.’
‘Rather than dehydrate out here,
I want to get out alive!’

They’d driven through Cooper’s Crossing
As the day was becoming dark,
He had been keen for pushing on
Though she had wanted to park.
The driver had the advantage, so
Their lights cut into the night,
In through the gibber country, where
The tracks crossed, left and right.

They’d entered the Stony Desert when
The first of the tyres blew,
They’d only taken a single spare,
She said, ‘That’s down to you!’
It took an hour to change it
Trying to jack the car in the sand,
The jack would sink in the bulldust mix
So she had to lend a hand.

By morning they were completely lost
And the radiator boiled,
The lights had flashed all over the dash
And the motor suddenly stalled.
‘I can’t believe that we’re stuck out here,’
She’d wailed, and punched his arm,
‘Why did I ever listen to you?
I should have stayed on the farm.’

‘Maybe you should,’ said Derek Beech,
His temper beginning to show,
‘You’re not much good at the outback life,
Go back to your Auntie Flo!’
‘That’s it,’ she said, and she pulled the ring
He’d given her days before,
Flung it down in his lap, and watched
It bounce to the desert floor.

She took a bottle of water, then
Stomped off the way that they came,
‘If you get lost you will die out there
With only yourself to blame!’
She took a short cut back to the track
They’d turned off, hours before,
And gradually drank the water, though
She knew that she needed more.

The endless dry and barren land
Had not seen rain for years,
The track wiped out by the drifting sand,
Colleen was soon in tears,
She stopped beneath a coolibah tree
Surviving on its own,
And rested there in the paltry shade
In the land of the great unknown.

While Derek sat in an agony
Of doubts, to cloud his mind,
Should he have gone along with her,
Or should he have stayed behind?
Some hours had passed before he rose
To place the ring on the car,
Along with a note, ‘I love you, girl,
But I don’t know where you are.’

He started to walk the way she’d gone,
The sun, it was going down,
He knew that hope was a step too far
As he walked along, and frowned,
If only he’d thought to call her name
Snapped out of his mute dismay,
He might have met her along the track,
Coming the other way.

They were only a hundred yards apart
When they passed like ships in the night,
And she had stumbled back to the car
When the sun put gloom to flight,
She found the note and she found the ring
And she placed it back on her hand,
Then sank beside their wreck of a car
And was covered by drifting sand.

While he was found, propped up by the tree
In the glare of the blazing sun,
His final thought of the way they’d fought
That never could be undone.
But love was there in the desert air
As she lay, the ring on her hand,
While he clung on to the bottle, she’d
Flung empty, down on the sand.

David Lewis Paget

The hills were awash with winter rain
As I walked on down to the cross,
My coat was drenched and my feet were wet
As I thought of my recent loss.
The sun was hidden behind the clouds
When I got to the crossroads there,
And a single sliver of lightning flashed,
Shed light on my own despair.

I knew that I’d get there early, so
I sheltered under a tree,
They’d not set off from the market place
At least, ‘til after three.
I should have come down in a coach and four
And kept right out of the rain,
But to freeze on the muddied bridle-path
Seemed to cauterize my pain.

It gave me time to adjust my mind
For the deed that had to be done,
Walk down the Hall of Remembrance for
A love that had been hard won,
The eyes that sparkled and smiled for me
Each time that I came in view,
Oh Caroline, sweet Caroline,
I’d have given the world for you!

That terrible night on the balcony
When you fought with Emily Krause,
You said she’d uttered some infamy
I should throw her out of the house.
I’d only left for an instant then
To recruit some help downstairs,
But when I returned to the balcony
She welcomed me back with a curse.

She said that you’d jumped, were in a rage,
She said that you’d had a fall,
She said that you’d gone, and I could gauge
That she was the best of all.
She backed away, and fell to her knees
While I stared down at the Mall,
She begged and sobbed, and she whispered ‘Please!’
But you lay there in a sprawl.

The cart is pulled by a single horse
As it ambles down from the town,
She’s dressed herself in a bonnet of blue
And worn her second-best gown.
A line of townsfolk follow it down
And they pelt her with refuse,
She screams with fear and I can but hear
Her say, ‘Please cut me loose.’

The crossroads are a terrible place
With a sign that points to town,
The single arm that is braced in place
Has a rope burn, up and down,
I clamber up on the ancient cart
And I check that her hands aren’t loose,
‘Not you, my love, not you, by God!’
As I place her neck in the noose.

David Lewis Paget

The Albert Mall was a narrow street
Named after the dying prince,
Where Queen Victoria donned the rags
Of a widow, ever since.
She’d sat outside in her royal Coach
And been heard to mutter, ‘Why?’
While Albert did what he had to do,
What he had to do was die!

And we came by when the Queen was dead
When the Mall was quite forgot,
To rent a room where the prince had died
If we’d known, we’d rather not.
The Mall was grubby and cheap by then
So we thought we’d make it do,
I asked Marie if she didn’t mind
And she said, ‘It’s up to you.’

It seems the room had been empty then
By the choking layers of dust,
I said, ‘Shall I let it blow outside?’
And Marie said, ‘If you must.’
It took us days just to clear the air
And to have a look around,
In some of the ancient furniture
You can imagine what we found.

The robe held some of the smartest clothes
I think, that we’d ever seen,
I said as much to Marie, ‘that dress
You’d swear, was fit for a queen,
And there, a suit for a gentleman
With a full blown grey Top Hat,
I said to Marie, ‘Shall we try them on,’
And she said, ‘Let’s do just that.’

So then on the eve of Michaelmas
We stood by the mirror there,
Arrayed in the best of formal gear
They called Victorian wear,
And music drifted up through the floor
From the ballroom down below,
While I, in a moment of madness
Blurted out, ‘Well, shall we go?’

We made our way to the music by
Descending a curving stair,
And finding a throng of dancers who
Were dressed the way we were,
Then someone called out ‘Her Majesty,’
And the music stayed and died,
While they all stared at Marie and bowed,
Made me feel queer inside.

I swear that they only saw the clothes,
They didn’t see us two,
And they were a shade ephemeral,
I could see right through them, too,
They went right back to their dancing
While we sat on an ottoman,
Whispering what were our chances if
We just got up, and ran.

But then they gradually faded, and
The music died away,
And we were left in an empty room
Before the light of day,
The clothes went back in the dusty robe
And we found another flat,
For just one night we were Prince and Queen
And we’re both in awe of that.

David Lewis Paget

We’d been together so long, it seemed
That nothing could tear us apart,
We lived our lives in a world of dreams
And Barbara lived in my heart,
But frost had covered the window pane
And then it began to snow,
As Barbara turned, with a look of pain
And said, ‘It’s best that you go.’

I didn’t know what she meant at first
As I looked up from my book,
“Go where?’ I questioned, but thought again
As she quelled my heart with a look.
‘I said I want you to leave,’ she cried,
And her face was set in stone,
‘We’ve come to the end of the path,’ she sighed,
‘I want to be left alone.’

Then suddenly all confusion reined
I didn’t know what to say,
Whatever had brought this mood on her,
I wished it would go away.
But she was firm, and she packed my things
And ushered me out the door,
I stood there shivering in the cold
To be back on my own once more.

I found a flat and I camped the night
There was barely a stick or chair,
I’d have to buy all the furniture
To make it a home in there.
But I sat and cried in the empty room
As the question came back, ‘Why?’
I’d loved her so and my heart was torn,
I thought I wanted to die.

I went to her with my questions, but
She slammed the door in my face,
Whatever love she had had for me
Had vanished, without a trace.
It hurt so much that she cut me off
With never so much as a sigh,
I called that all that I wanted was
To tell me the reason, why?

The roses had bloomed so late that year
Were still in the garden bed,
We’d always tended the bush with joy,
We both loved the colour red,
So I snipped one off as I left one day,
And planted it under her door,
To let her know that I loved her still
I didn’t know how to say more.

Her brother called in a week or so,
Said she was in hospital,
She’d gone in just for a minor cure
And thought that he’d better tell.
So I caught the bus and I went on down
With a quaking fear in my heart,
She hadn’t said there was something wrong
Before she tore us apart.

The doctor came in his long white coat,
His brow and his face was grim,
I said, ‘Don’t tell me the news is bad,’
He said, ‘I’m out on a limb.
Your wife just passed from the surgery,
But she pulled, from under her clothes,
And asked if I’d pass this on to you,’
In his hand was a red, red rose.

David Lewis Paget

Whenever I ride in the countryside
On the further side of the hill,
I can see the new church steeple, rising
Over the fields and rills,
Then I venture down to the valley, on
The Little Newhampton side,
And see the wreck of the ancient church
And remember the day it died.

Its blackened stone lies wide to the sky,
Its rafters lie in the nave,
If God was passing that fateful day
He thought it too late to save,
The lightning bolt that shattered his cross
Went on to set it on fire,
The lectern, pews, of Reverend Buse
Conspired to burn on his pyre.

They found his skull, all covered in ash
But the rest of him had gone,
Had flown his soul with its blackened wings
To a feast on the Eve of John,
He was known to hold a Satanic Mass
On the night of the Witches Moon,
But the Bishop’s men were ******* his track
And would have defrocked him soon.

His congregation was always sparse,
For the good folk stayed away,
They’d heard strange rumours of what went on
With the Squire, and the Widow Hay,
They locked themselves behind cedar doors
And called on the god of wrath,
With lighted candles, inverted cross,
Laid out on the altar cloth.

The evening of the lightning strike
The leadlight flickered and flashed,
And screams rang out in the early hours
As a black cat hurried past,
For then the windows had glowed bright red
To herald a presence there,
While a deep, loud gutteral voice rang out
To foul and corrupt the air.

‘Where are my churls and underlings,
My troglodytes and my trolls?
Tonight is the night of sundering
Each evil heart from its soul!’
The Squire burst out, made a run for it
And tried to leap on his horse,
But the old black mare took him back in there,
And somebody slammed the doors.

And that was when the lightning struck,
It flashed, and shattered the cross,
The blazing roof came tumbling down
And the Widow Hay was lost.
They never found the Squire or his horse,
But I think that’s just as well,
They’re probably roasting chestnuts, down
In the seventh circle of Hell!

David Lewis Paget

They took her up to the mountain top
With the altar set in place,
I screamed and shouted for them to stop,
But they laughed, spat in my face.
They threatened me as they laid her down
On that cold grey marble slab,
Then stripped the clothes from her shivering form
As I told them they were mad.

She lay exposed for the world to see
As they formed a line around,
So grim they looked in their livery
In their hoods, and long black gowns,
I wasn’t part of their magic cell
And they said I’d have to leave,
Before enacting their secret spell
That would leave me then to grieve.

‘You’re just a pack of barbarians,’
I shrieked, but the mood was tense,
‘Go play with your Rastafarians,’
They laughed, but it made no sense,
Why would they ****** an innocent girl
In the third phase of the moon,
Just to appease some devilish god
On the first Sunday in June.

Two hulking brutes took a-hold of me
And they dragged me down the hill,
I said, ‘you’re all going to pay for this,
You’re denying my free will.’
They left me there and they climbed back up
But they’d said, ‘You’d best beware,
You might be a second sacrifice
Should you try to come back there.’

I heard their horrible mumble as
The group began to chant,
It came in waves from the hilltop graves
Like some evil covenant,
But then the scream of a four wheel drive
Came roaring up the hill,
Filled with the men in uniform
I can see the vision still.

Three shots rang out, there was quite a rout
As the hoods had turned to flee,
Stumbling down the mountainside
And a few had passed by me,
I wondered then who had brought them there
To defeat this evil scheme,
It’s beyond belief, but I felt relief
When the girl began to scream.

A year has flown, but I’m not alone
Since they saved that sacrifice,
She’s home and free, and she married me,
And I must admit, it’s nice.
I’ve often said, ‘What was in your head,
When you turned to me,’ and stuff,
‘I thought I might as well marry you
Since you saw me in the buff.’

David Lewis Paget

The cloud hung over the mountainside
Like a black and evil pall,
It took the sun from the valley, and
It held the folk in thrall,
The crops lay dormant in the fields
For they wouldn’t ripen now,
The farmers down in the valley cried,
‘It has to go, but how?’

They’d watched the cloud as it gathered
Bringing a dark and fierce storm,
With hail that battered the tender shoots
And flattened the barleycorn,
They shook their fists at the darkening sky
At this untoward attack,
But the cloud had threatened them, by and by
When the lightning answered back.

Then thunder rolled down the mountainside
And it shook their rustic homes,
It rattled the beams and the rafters, and
Was felt in their feeble bones,
They thought the wind would blow it away
But the air up there was calm,
And still it hovered there, day by day
To blanket each valley farm.

The tiny Kirk was amass with men
Who’d never been there before,
In hopes that a sudden show of faith
Would bring their god to the fore,
But the cloud still leered from the mountaintop
For weeks, and it hung there low,
‘Perhaps the answer is not with God,
But the gods of long ago!’

The older men in the village thought
The answer might lie with Baal,
And some had prayed to the thunder god
But the answer they got was hail,
‘There must be something the elders knew
To bring such things to a stop.’
‘That cloud up there is the Wandering Jew
Who never may reap a crop.’

They racked their brains for the thing to do
And one of them wasn’t nice,
‘What we need is a ****** girl
To send up a sacrifice.’
So they seized a maid called Annabelle,
Whose parents were dead and gone,
And dragged her up to the mountaintop
In hopes it would move along.

But they weren’t too sure just what to do,
Should they play a chord with a lyre,
Should they sound a note, then cut her throat
And throw her corpse on a fire?
She screamed at the top of her voice, just once
And the sun came shining through,
‘I’ve not been a ****** now, six months,
But I wouldn’t be telling you!’

David Lewis Paget

Out on the marsh on a lonely night
The wind soughs through his rags,
The hat that’s pinned to his painted face,
Flutters and soars, then sags,
His eyes are wide and his mouth is grim
As an owl is put to flight,
And nothing but shadows will venture there
For the Scarecrow rules the night.

And back in the manse in a window seat
The Parson’s daughter sits,
She stares at the fluttering coat-tails, but
In truth, is scared to bits,
She watches the sails of the windmill turn
And creak and groan in the gloom,
As clouds come stuttering over the marsh
In the rays of a Harvest Moon.

The father is out in the donkey cart
To tend to his aging flock,
He’s left Elizabeth waiting there
By the tick of the hallway clock,
But out on the moors and beyond the marsh
There rides one Highway Jack,
A frock coat topped with a bunch of lace
And a gold trimmed tricorne hat.

He’s whipped the horse to a lather
In a retreat from a new affray,
For the magistrates have gathered
Vowing to ride him down that day,
The redcoats wait in the village Inn
For the sound that they know too well,
When the curate sees the approaching horse
He’s to toll the old church bell.

But the curate lies in a drunken fit
On the floor of the old church nave,
And soon, by matins his soul will flit
From life to an early grave,
Elizabeth sits in the window seat
And thinks of the coin and plate,
As the highwayman dismounts, and ties
His horse to the manse’s gate.

He beats on the door, ‘Please let me in,
I’m weary and faint, that’s all.
I wouldn’t abuse your person, but
I fear my back’s to the wall.’
She leaves the seat and she slides the bar
For bracing the oaken door,
‘I dare not, sir, I fear for my life,
You’re safer out on the moor!’

Their voices echo across the marsh
Like fear, distilled in the night,
And something shudders out in the gloom
And lurches to left and right,
It seems forever, but now a sound
Tolls out, like a final knell,
For something, out in the church tonight,
Is tolling the steeple bell.

He barely makes it back to his horse
When the redcoats stand in line,
Their muskets fire a volley of shot
And his coat turns red, like wine.
They go to the church when the deed is done
To say, ‘You have done well!’
But the curate lies on the cold stone floor,
The Scarecrow tolled the bell!

David Lewis Paget

Marion Carrion, she was a tease,
She really knew how to flirt,
Would shake her hips and her moving bits
That were hidden under her skirt.
She’d beckon me out to the hockey field
And raise her skirt to the knees,
Said I could look at her secret nook
For only a simple ‘Please.’

She had all a woman’s mysteries
Although she was only a girl,
And knew the power of her nether bits
Would put my mind in a whirl.
So she showed her thighs with her flashing eyes
And then would have shown me more,
While I would share with a candid air
That I knew what she had in store.

Out there on the side of the hockey field
In the shade of the only bush,
We’d hide behind, so my hand could find
Whatever would make her flush.
I thought that I was the favoured one
While playing about with her toys,
But then I found on the soccer ground
She was sharing with all of the boys.

That moment of disillusionment
I thought would have broken my heart,
But I was tough and had seen enough,
There were other girls in the park.
So I thank Marion Carrion now
For her retrospect revelation,
She taught me well on the road to hell
And saw to my education.

David Lewis Paget

From the time that Alison woke she knew
That she had to speak her lines,
It was part of some strange assignment that
Had lodged, deep in her mind,
And every day had begun like this
From as far back as the Prom,
For every day was a part to play
Though she didn’t know where from.

Her lines appeared in her deepest sleep,  
Were as glue upon her page,
She wasn’t allowed to deviate
Protest, or express her rage,
She’d go to Milady’s ballroom all
Dressed up with bustle and flare,
Plastered with ancient make-up and
A Pompadour in her hair.

And Alan, down off the ballroom he
Would finish his last cigar,
Straighten his wig and tails and take
His boots on into the bar,
A tumbler there of Cognac he’d
Toss back, then head for the ball,
Looking to share his heart out there
With the fairest one of them all.

He’d met her before on other nights,
She’d hidden behind her fan,
Her lashes were long and fluttered then
As he tried to hold her hand,
But she had proved to be skittish, she
Would lead him along, then stay,
And disappear in the dancers there
As she struggled to get away.

But Alan was more determined now,
He pinned her against the wall,
Caught the scent of her heaving breath,
‘Don’t you care for me, at all?’
She’d hesitate as those hated lines
Once more came into her head,
‘Oh my, this maiden is blushing, sir,
My cheeks are burning red.’

He led her towards an ante-room
For a long desired embrace,
But he couldn’t see behind the fan
The anguish on her face,
She wanted to live and love, she thought
She wanted to cry aloud,
But all that her script would let her do
Was gravitate to the crowd.

And Alan was so frustrated,
He thought that he’d never score,
For Alison seemed to disappear
As he opened the bedroom door,
And she stood out in the coffee room
With amazement on her face,
Where had he gone, she’d closed her eyes
To wait for his sweet embrace?

Alan tore off his tie and wig
And he hurled them to the floor,
Why did she always disappear
Just there, at the bedroom door?
He flung about, and he just went out
With his face so set and pale,
‘I’ll not be staying a moment more
In a Barbara Cartland tale.’

He had wondered where his speech came from
It had seemed so stiff and trite,
Embedded into his head, it seemed
When he was asleep at night,
He jumped on into a cab outside
In a vain attempt to flee,
When Alison ran beside him then
And cried, ‘Hey, wait for me!’

David Lewis Paget

I like to dive on a sunken wreck
If the sea is not too rough,
The seabed’s littered with carcasses
I never can get enough,
They range from the Roman caravel,
With the huge, high mounted prow,
To the dinosaurs of steel, from wars,
Still roaming the oceans now.

Some of them lie not far offshore
So the water’s not too deep,
I can trail an oxy line down there
Up to a hundred feet,
But a scuba tank I would have to thank
For the freedom to explore,
Deep in the bowels of a sunken ship
In the search for gold moidores.

I dived one blustery Autumn day
In a well known coastal rip,
The sea rose up and carried me off
Away from my chosen ship,
But through the gloom of that Autumn storm
There loomed an exciting shape,
The remains of a Spanish Galleon,
Blown way off course by the Cape.

All I could see was the galleon stern
With the Bon-Adventure mast,
Broken off and above the mud
It had settled in, at last,
I wriggled in through a window frame
And I found the Captain’s den,
Complete with the Captain’s skull and bones
Back from I don’t know when.

The figure sat at a writing desk
Sprawled in an ancient chair,
The wood of each was well preserved
And so was the Captain’s hair,
A flintlock pistol lay on the desk
Next to the dead man’s hand,
A bullet hole in the bleached white skull
As the ship sank into the sand.

I knew that gold lay under the mud,
I’d have to come back and search,
But just as the storm was blowing up
The galleon gave a lurch,
It freed itself from its clinging grave
And started to float away,
And I swam out as it disappeared,
Lost to this very day.

For somewhere under the heaving sea
It sails, but under the swell,
Back where its sailors sailed before
When they were consigned to hell.
It roams abroad with its hoard of gold
And may well settle again,
Along with its phantom Captain, but
Will never be seen by men.

David Lewis Paget

He wandered along old Codshill Street,
Quite late on that Christmas Eve,
And scanned the used haberdashery
Society ladies would leave,
The hats they’d worn, but only the once,
The boots with barely a scuff,
The poplin prints they hadn’t worn since,
A single dance was enough.

He stood outside in his working boots
The ones he wore at the mill,
He hadn’t had time to change himself
He should have been working still.
But in his pocket he clutched the pound
He’d saved for many a day,
He’d squirrelled each shilling away for months
Out of his meagre pay.

And all he could see was Mirabelle,
Who lodged at his heart and eye,
She worked upstairs in the counting room
Above where the shuttles fly,
And he would glimpse her once in a while
Pottering to and fro,
Dressed in a worn and paltry frock
Where the stitching was letting go.

He’d wait outside, and follow her home
To see she was safe and sound,
The rogues that he’d meet in Codshill Street
Would keep their eyes on the ground.
While she was aware of his loving gaze
And sometimes gave him a smile,
Others were bold in their loving ways
And pressed their court for a while.

And so it was on this Christmas Eve
That a Squire had stood at her door,
With a string of pearls you wouldn’t believe
He’d bought in a jeweller’s store,
And she was flushed as she let him in,
So pleased to have such a gift,
For she was only a working girl
And his interest gave her a lift.

But there in the haberdashery
In a window, stood at the side,
Was standing a model, dressed entire
In a gown so fine, he’d cried.
He thought he could see his Mirabelle
In place of the mannequin,
In the gown of grey crushed velvet, so
In a moment then, went in.

‘You know that the gown is second-hand,’
The girl explained to his stare,
‘Here are a couple of tiny stains,
And there is a little tear.
But this, that once cost a hundred pounds
Is a bargain now for a cause,
If you can give me a single pound
This lovely gown can be yours.’

She placed the gown in a long flat box,
And tied a ribbon around,
Then he flew out to his Mirabelle
In hopes she still could be found.
He saw the pearls were around her neck
When she had opened the door,
But once she pulled out the gown, she checked,
And dropped the pearls on the floor.

Her kiss was sweet on that Christmas Eve,
Though he had showed her the stains,
The tears she shed on that gorgeous thread
He said, were like summer rains,
She had no time for the wealthy Squire,
She’d waited for him all along,
Her greatest gift was a second-hand gown
With the love that the gown came from.

David Lewis Paget

Her skin was dark and her hair was black,
She walked with a Spanish sway,
‘She could be from South America,’
I would hear the neighbours say,
She’d taken the cottage in Ansley Court,
Put seagrass mat on the floor,
Then given them something to talk about
With the shingle she hung on the door.

‘A Course is starting on Wednesday week
For the women of Risdon Vale,
“The Secret Rites of the Shuar Revealed,”
(For ladies alone - No Male!)
The art of centuries, hidden ‘til now
Will be taught in a matter of weeks,
Be among the first to learn of these skills,
(At just sixty dollars, each!)’

Said one, ‘It’s probably just a scam,
For what could she have to show?’
‘This village is such a bore,’ said Pam,
‘I’d pay to see rushes grow!’
But curiosity killed the cat
They say, in that wise old saw,
And half the women of Risdon Vale
Turned up to the stranger’s door.

She took the women, one at a time
Examined each one alone,
Then chose just six to make up the course
And sent all the others home.
She’d weeded out all the gossipers,
And the ones that were loose of tongue,
Had sworn to secrecy those she chose
At an altar with candles on.

Not one of the chosen ones would speak,
Not one of them say a word,
They hung together in whispered cliques
And wouldn’t be overheard.
Their husbands too, were kept in the dark
When asked, they would heave a sigh,
Shrug their shoulders, and raise a brow
Though everyone wondered, ‘Why?’

Ted Wilkins wasn’t impressed by this
And took himself to the pub,
‘I don’t like secrets,’ he told his mates,
Then left to head for the scrub.
They said he’d gone with Emily Bates,
They’d been having it off for years,
‘Her cottage is suddenly empty too,’
Said the wags in ‘The Bullock’s Curse.’

There wasn’t a tear in the Wilkins home,
She seemed to be quite relieved,
‘I always thought that she must have known,’
So half of the Vale believed,
A woman alone is a tidy mark
For a man like Michael Stout,
They saw him creep to her house one night,
But no-one saw him come out.

The tongues were wagging in Risdon Vale
About ‘funny goings-on,’
‘The preacher hasn’t been seen at church
Since that spat with Lucy Chong,’
Then Red Redoubt who had beat his wife
Took off, when he knew the score,
For Gwen had bid him ‘good riddance’ when
He was heading on out the door.

The women met on a Wednesday night
And they burned a light ‘til dawn,
‘What do you think they do in there?’
Said the gossip, Betty Spawn,
She crept up close to the house one night
And peered at the light within,
So Pam came out and surprised her there,
Said, ‘Why don’t you come right in!’

The six week course was almost done
When the police came round one night,
Kicked the door of the cottage in,
Gave the girls a terrible fright.
‘We need to know what you’re doing here,
There are rumours, round about,’
But the woman from South America
In the dark, had slipped on out.

There were pots and pans and cooking things
And a smell of something stale,
‘We’ve been learning all these secret things
But we can’t tell you, you’re male!’
Then a cry came out from another room
From a lad in the local police,
He said, ‘There’s six new shrunken heads
Out here on the mantelpiece!’

David Lewis Paget

There are places still on this planet where
No man has ever trod,
That lie so deep in the undergrowth,
Put there by the grace of God,
And denizens lie there, watchfully
In guarding their holy place,
Intruders enter but never return
As part of the human race.

The earth entangles and trips their feet
When they stray from near and far,
And vines entwine in a blink of time
To tether them where they are,
While briars inject as they’re taking root
Seep poison into their veins,
To leave them dank with their eyes so blank
With what human thought remains.

I saw you wandering aimlessly
Too close to the place of God,
And followed you inconspicuously
Or you might have thought it odd,
And when you stumbled and almost fell
At the edge of their secret wood,
I found and slashed at the vines that bound
In that alien neighbourhood.

I lured you out of the convent walls
And I sought to take you home,
You raised your head in confusion, said
That all roads lead to Rome,
I said, ‘You’re throwing your life away
For the drear of a lonely cell,
But life is there to be lived, my love,
Or all roads lead to Hell.’

The Penguins came to collect you, tried
To bind you with former vows,
And flapped their wings at your reason
Using what force the law allows,
I slammed the door in my silent war
On their medieval taint,
And hoped you’d say that you’d marry me,
Though I never wanted a saint!

It’s been a year and I see you stare
Each time that we pass their gate,
Wondering if you should be there
But I thank God, it’s too late,
Our daughter bubbles with life, and grins
As a child of God, she should,
I’d rather her path was paved with sins
Than led to their secret wood.

David Lewis Paget

She raked through the hearth fire ashes,
And scattered the chicken bones,
Then turned a page in a silent rage
And added some pebble stones,
She searched for a spell to end in hell
For the man who had told her ‘No,’
A spell of hate from her hearth fire grate
To follow wherever he’d go.

While he stood out on the roadway
Considering where he’d been,
He’d fled out there from the witches lair
Where she’d lured him, sight unseen.
At first she seemed to be beautiful
When first he entered her lair,
But then his eyes grew wide in surprise,
Got used to the dark in there.

She’d sat on a velvet cushion
And raised her skirt to the knee,
He thought he saw what she wanted him for
As she smiled unpleasantly,
He turned in a mild confusion,
His women were never so bold,
He sat and stared, got out of his chair,
Said ‘Sorry, you’re just too old.’

He looked at the streets about him,
And noticed the cobblestones,
They crissed and crossed, he was more than lost
In a muddle of chicken bones.
He couldn’t figure which way to go,
As they’d twist and turn out there,
And every time he would cross the road
He’d end back at the witches lair.

His mouth was a pile of ashes,
His mind full of pebble stones,
He found himself at the same front door
Spitting out chicken bones.
He burst back into the witches lair
And he saw her crouched by the hearth,
She stared at him with an awful grin,
Let out a terrible laugh.

‘Have you come again to reject me,
To tell me I’m just too old?
You’ll never recover your other lover,’
She said, and his heart turned cold.
He snatched at her faded Grimoire,
And turned to another page,
Then read a spell from a demon of hell
That was said, would make her age.

He muttered the words of the ritual
And her face grew taut with fear,
Her hair turned grey at the words he’d say
At the spell she’d not want to hear.
Her skin grew slack, and fell from her bones
As it said in that ancient tome,
Then his head had cleared as she disappeared,
And he went wandering home.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

I saw her first in the lighting flash
That lit her up in the storm,
The rain was beating on down to slash
Her more than shapely form,
She’d just emerged from a woodland copse
Was soaked as she could be,
So came to shelter beneath the
Mighty Oak, along with me.

Her hair was more than bedraggled, but
As black as a phantom crow,
Her clothes were old and ragged, but
They clung to her figure so,
I asked her what had possessed her then
To wander out in the rain,
She looked at me and began to pout,
‘I could well ask you the same.’

I said I wasn’t prepared for it,
It came down out of the blue,
Just as the sun went underground
And dark, so what about you?
She said that she only ventured out
When the daylight was eclipsed,
In wind and storm she was newly born
On an evening such as this.

But then she sighed and I saw her eyes
Weren’t blue or green, but black,
Her lips an unearthly red, like blood,
No lipstick looked like that.
She said, ‘they call me The Selfling, for
I offer myself for free,
I give whatever you want, but then
I take what I want for me.’

She lay down under that mighty tree
And pulled me down on top,
Onto a pile of Autumn leaves,
And said, ‘now don’t you stop.’
I must confess that I did no less
Than The Selfling said to do,
As she took me into that wilderness
There was pain and pleasure too.

Her teeth bit into my helpless wrist
As we rolled there in the mud,
I felt my essence begin to ebb
As she took a pint of blood.
When I awoke I was on my own
Though I caught a final glimpse,
Of her, in a flash of lightning, though
I’ve never seen her since.

David Lewis Paget

When first we moved on into the house
They said that we wouldn’t last,
The locals told us nobody had
Of the many who’d left in the past.
We asked if the house was haunted, but
They said that it’s not, ‘It’s cool!’
The reason nobody stayed, they said,
Was the serpent that lived in the pool.

The ‘pool’ it seemed was the small lagoon
That was not so far from the house,
‘You’ll notice that there’s never a rat,
You’ll not see a single mouse!’
It seems the serpent came out at night
And fed on the rodents there,
‘You’d better keep all the windows shut,
And jam the doors with a chair.’

We settled in and we laughed at that,
‘They must believe I’m a fool!
I haven’t found anyone out there yet
Who has seen this thing in the pool.
It’s only a superstition, something
Handed down from the past,
They love to shiver and peddle gloom
In the hopes we’ll be aghast.’

We sauntered down and we took it in,
The water was calm and still,
And willows, myrtles and evergreens
Were set in this sweet idyll,
‘I think that I’m going to love it here,
It’s peaceful and quiet,’ said Cass,
I didn’t mention the snaking trail
That I’d noticed, deep in the grass.

She questioned me when I barred the doors,
And shut all the windows tight,
‘You’re not afraid of the serpent, Jack?’
She laughed, and I said ‘Not quite!
There’s gnats about in the midnight air
And I don’t want them in here.’
She laughed again, ‘That’s a good excuse,
I’m sure to believe you, dear!’

Cass would sleep like a log each night,
Would sleep ‘til the break of day,
But I would wake to the slightest scrape,
To a Hoot-Owl, hunting its prey.
I heard a sound on the patio
Like something slithering there,
A tapping sound on the window pane
And the movement of a chair.

It got to the point I couldn’t sleep,
I’d lie there, listening,
Awake to the slightest sound out there,
The barest rustling,
I’d keep a shovel beside the door
Get up, and sit in fright,
Holding my breath, and waiting for
Its visit, every night.

I opened the door one moonless night
And the monster slithered in,
A forked tongue flickering out in front
And cold eyes full of sin,
I slammed the shovel down on its neck
And the head just fell away,
While the rest just coiled through the open door
And the blood came out in a spray.

I must have got it all over me
So I should have washed my hands,
But somehow, some of the serpent’s blood
Got over the pots and pans,
I dumped the body out in the woods
Hid deep in the winter grass,
Then cooked a breakfast fit for a Queen
For the love of my lady, Cass.

I should have known about serpent’s blood
I should have been more than wise,
For Voodoo tells us that serpent’s blood
Will make you grow snakes inside,
So Cass came down with a fever then
And she moaned and cried, ‘Enough!’
She said, ‘There’s something a-move in there,
That’s slithering round my gut.’

I tended her for a week or more
Put a cold compress on her brow,
Trying to get her fever down,
I wouldn’t have done that now;
The seventh morning I checked on her
And she called out, ‘Don’t come in!’
I saw her there on the bedroom floor,
She’d slithered out of her skin.

I stepped aside as she tried to slide
On out through the open door,
She moved like a snake, covered in scales,
I watched her in shock, and awe,
She slithered down to the old lagoon
And disappeared in the reeds,
And that was the last I saw of Cass
I swear, and my heart, it bleeds.

They’ve got me locked in a prison cell
As they think I’ve done her in,
They went to look why she wasn’t there
But they only found her skin,
They think I’m some sort of monster
That I’m mad, or merely a fool,
I keep on saying they’ll find her,
She’s a serpent, down in the pool.

David Lewis Paget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget

Whenever the wind is blustery
And buffets the chamber door,
I find Elaine, curling in fear
Down on the hallway floor.
She cries, calls suddenly out to me,
‘Do you hear the shades of sin?
I know that it’s got it in for me,
You’re never to let it in.’

‘Never to let what in?’ I say,
‘It’s only the southern wind,
Blowing in turgid sudden gusts,
To rattle the panelling.’
‘It’s ever much more,’ Elaine replied,
‘I’ve seen it up in the trees,
Just like a flight of monster bats
To beat me down to my knees.’

As if in reply, a mighty gust
Blew in the chamber door,
In came a flurry of autumn leaves
That settled, down on the floor.
But with it a cold and clammy darkness
Seemed to enter the room,
An awesome sight in the fading light
It huddled there in the gloom.

It came in the shape of a giant cape,
A hood of enormous size,
And peering out from the hood, no doubt,
A pairing of bloodshot eyes.
I heard a bubbling in its throat
A babble of rasping sounds,
‘It’s time to come for the deed you’ve done,
You’re due in the devil’s grounds.’

Elaine lay whimpering in the hall,
She lay there, hiding her eyes,
‘I didn’t think you would find me out,’
She muttered, to my surprise.
‘What was the awful thing you did,
You never told me before.’
‘I poisoned her drink, then ran and hid,
When she fell down on the floor.’

A bony hand reached out from the cape
And seized Elaine by the throat,
She fought and struggled, tried to escape
Then screamed, in a long, high note.
‘You can’t be late for your nuptials,’
The beast had growled in return,
‘You’ll soon be wed to a demon, who
Will take you to hell, to burn.’

I watched it pull Elaine to her feet,
Then drag her out through the door,
The monster bats were up in the trees,
But she lay dead on the floor.
Whenever I hear the southern wind
Come beat on the door outside,
I think of the times that I have sinned,
And shudder, how Elaine died.

David Lewis Paget

Their shadows should have stepped side by side
As once they had done before,
But nobody noticed that one had gone
From the boardwalk trace on the floor,
They still paraded, down by the beach
At the height of the afternoon,
And friends would swear he was still in reach
Though she wore an air of gloom.

Nobody actually spoke to them
So it must have been hard to tell,
Which of the couple was really there
And which fallen under a spell,
The law of shadows is crystal clear
If you’re there, a shadow is cast,
The sun shines through if it isn’t you
For that’s its primary task.

It happens I knew the guy quite well
And he had shadow to spare,
While she was much more ephemeral,
Was somebody not quite there.
I wondered what had attracted him
For she gave out a spray of gloom,
There wasn’t that gay affinity
That could gladly light up a room.

I watched as his life force faded away,
His shadow to disappear,
I told him he needed to leave that day
Or the end of his world was near.
But she reached out, and shooed me away,
Seized hold of his wavering hand,
Her eyes burned bright with an evil light,
While his were blank and bland.

I know that we never conversed again
I’d see him afar by day,
She clung on tight to his fading light
As she marched him around the bay,
He hadn’t a shadow left to throw
When at last he died on the beach,
Condemned by her to a living hell
As his life slipped out of reach.

He was laid to rest at St. Mary’s Cross
While I waited for her to pass,
To see if the shadow she stole from him
Would still cleave to her, at last.
But sunbeams shone through her mourning veil
There was only mine could save,
While I made sure as I stepped one back
That she’d die by my brother’s grave.

David Lewis Paget

He only appears in the pouring rain
When all the gutters are clogged,
I asked if anyone knew his name
They said, but my ears were blocked.
There wasn’t a thing you could hear out there
For the water, bubbling through,
The rain’s refrain in a noisy drain,
The thunder and lightning too.

You’d see his shadow on distant walls
Thrown there by a gaslight flare,
And catch the shape of his stovepipe hat
Flitting both here and there,
They say he’s waiting for dollymops
Just as they’re starting to run,
As night is chasing the day away
And rain’s blotting out the sun.

Then rumour has it, the Ripper’s back
We’re waiting for blood and gore,
We’re tense, awaiting the first attack,
For that’s what the Ripper’s for.
They say he chews on his victim’s bones
Then eats their liver and all,
The streets will fill with their awful groans
As blood will spatter a wall.

And then the sound of a horses hooves
Pulling a Landau coach,
Its wheels a-rattle on cobblestones
Just as he cuts their throats,
Perhaps he’ll lure them to take a ride
In that black, square box on wheels,
Then all that slashing goes on inside,
God knows how a razor feels.

We sit and muse in the Hemlock Inn
A dollymop on our laps,
And feed the terror they feel within
Filling in most of the gaps.
They turn to us for protection then
So we gain their favours cheap,
And keep on telling those same old tales
Til the bawds curl up, and weep.

Whenever the fog and the mist are thick
And the lamplight’s just a glow,
We make our way to the Hemlock Inn
Where the skirts are raised, you know,
Then say his shadow’s been seen again
Just to make the bawds all shriek,
‘He’s getting ready to pounce, and then…’
He’ll be there again, next week.

David Lewis Paget

I recall I lay at the top of the hill
A toboggan, all set to go,
My friend behind, and urging me on
We’d had a good fall of snow,
I was lying flat, head first on that
When we hurtled on down the hill,
My friend was dragging his feet to steer,
He steered to a certain spill.

A clump of trees in the valley below,
I told him to steer out wide,
But he dragged his foot with his hob-nailed boot,
I knew we were going to collide,
The tree came up like a railway train
There were stars and I lay there still
A piece of branch was lodged in my brain
From the tree at the base of the hill.

They said I’d never survive, I know,
They said I’d surely be dead,
With a length of fir tree, covered in blood
And sticking right out of my head.
I was out of it for a month or more,
A coma of long lost time,
But finally woke in the hospital
To find I was almost blind.

All I could see were shadows, shades
That drifted in silent space,
These shadows all were as black as coal
And none of them had a face,
As if I was seeing a different world
To the one I’d always been in,
And one of them sidled on up to me,
‘You’re seeing the world of sin!’

I couldn’t see when the nurses came
But I heard them when they spoke,
A doctor came, said ‘it’s such a shame,
So sad for the little bloke!’
Three shadows were hanging on every word
As they lounged near the further wall,
And then I knew that they stuck like glue
For the Doc had done for them all!

They sent me home to recuperate
Sat out in an easy chair,
The garden looked like a negative
Of a black and white picture there,
My parents slowly came into view
But the shades stood out by the fence,
I’d always thought they were both sin free
But their sins were there, past tense.

My friend from the great toboggan spill
Came to visit me there to see
If I’d suspect that he’d steered direct,
Deliberately into the tree,
But a shadow hung at his shoulder there
And it gave his game away,
The shadow was mine, and over time
Will be there ‘til his dying day.

We’re all of us shadow makers when
We’re sinned against, done wrong,
We don’t have to be earth shakers, but
That sin will never be gone.
My sight has slowly recovered now
But I wonder, now I am back,
How many shadows are following me,
And when are they going to attack?

David Lewis Paget

He got to the top of the mountain
And he saw the shadow of God,
Then he heard it mutter, and shouting
‘Will you heed the reck of the rod.’
Then he fell on his face in horror
When he saw the burning bush,
And he said, ‘I’ll begin tomorrow,
Don’t be in such a rush.’

He headed down from the mountain
And his face was strained and grey,
He stood by the edge of a fountain,
Said ‘I’ve come to make your day.’
He saw the villagers gathered
And he said, ‘New rules from God,
They’ll clatter down from the mountain
And will make you reck his rod.’

And then the first of the tablets
Came rolling into the square,
Engraved with a form of writing
That they’d never seen out there,
They asked the man to explain it,
And he thought, ‘this might be fun,’
‘No matter what you might gain by it,
Don’t ever design a gun!’

The wise men nodded so wisely,
And the dumb ones just looked glum,
Whatever they knew, knew slightly,
They’d never heard of a gun,
The second tablet tumbled down
From somewhere up on the mountain,
It bounced and reared and fell right in
To the water, deep in the fountain.

‘All should be baptised here, it said
By jumping into the water,
But know you’ll be married here instead
If you jump with somebody’s daughter.’
More tablets rolled down the mountainside
To quick for any to count them,
And some were crushed in the awful rush,
The ones that had tried to mount them.

‘You mustn’t commit adultery
Unless you’re adults in play,
And then when you swap your wives about
It’s only for just one day,
The seventh tablet deals with death
And what you should do, or oughta,
After you ****, just take a breath
Then go for a general slaughter.’

The man went back to the mountain top
And he sought the shadow of God,
‘Got all the tablets, thanks my friend,
But isn’t it rather odd?
I couldn’t make out a word they said,
They passeth my understanding.’
‘Don’t call me your friend, you slimy sod,
The Devil wants you, for branding!’

David Lewis Paget