Imprinting herself around me
   a tenderly etched embrace
Integrity of heart and soul
   intact, time shan't erase

A scarab if a beetle
   a nova if a star
An amulet of conviction
   pulsing light from afar

My hand is open to her
   my life freely given
To be loved simply by loving
   ancient wisdom recently rewritten

We’re all down here on a long, long train
To be taken for a ride,
As the signs flash past each year, we gasp
At the changing countryside,
Each mile is a passing minute, and
Each year is a passing mile,
The further we get from the starting point
The more that it seems worthwhile.

Each coach is numbered a different year
It depends when we got on,
Each coach was first hooked on at the back
But then it will move along,
The train gets longer with every mile
As we slowly move to the front,
And nothing can stop this railway ride
He gave as his covenant.

We know there’s a tunnel coming up
It’s somewhere around the bend,
We left our names at the starting point
There’s a headstone at the end.
I drop my poems along the track
For the ones that are far behind,
In hopes that they might remember me
As a man who was simply kind.

My children are twenty coaches back
My parents further ahead,
They’ve both gone into the tunnel now
Past a light that’s showing red.
That tunnel’s ahead for all of us
As each coach will end its ride,
But isn’t it going to be glorious
When we pass out the other side?

David Lewis Paget

The brothers Carmody, Jim and John
Were hooked on the keyboard wars,
While growing up, they’d never got on
It was always, ‘Mine, not yours!’
Jim would destroy his brother’s bed
John was more subtle than that,
He’d battery acid his brother’s clothes,
Burn holes in his favourite hat.

They lived just barely a mile apart
When they both left home for good,
If one ran into the other, then
They’d part in a surly mood,
So each had opened a Facebook page
To put the other one down,
Where Jim said, ‘You can’t control your rage!’
And John said Jim was a clown.

They both got married, their wives joined in
To this internecine war,
‘I hear your Betty’s seen round the town
On a bicycle built for four!’
‘Your Jillian picked up the second prize
When she won a date with you,
The ugliest guy in the neighbourhood
And that was the third prize, too.’

Jim sprayed bleach on his brother’s lawn,
John was as sly as a fox,
One night he crept to his brother’s place
Set fire to his letterbox.
The knives were out, there were no holds barred
‘Til the night of the power blackout,
They each paused over the enter key
With a message to chill them out.

‘I’m ready to bomb your citadel,
And nobody will survive!’
‘My crew is coming to do for you,
You’ll never get out alive!’
They hit the keys as the power went out
The messages couldn’t be traced,
They’d flown unguided from each P.C.
And travelled in cyberspace.

Three hundred years they would float adrift
The Carmody boys, long dead,
With thirteen generations of theirs
Not knowing what each one said.
Their words, unscrambled in outer space
Would alight on an alien shore,
Where the native Rogons got what they wished,
An excuse for planetary war!

‘They’re coming to bomb our Citadel,’
Said the Chief of the Rogons, Vork,
‘We’d better send out our nuclear fleet,
This Earth is sparring for war!’
The fleet set out on their ten year hike
On their mission through hyperspace,
The Orkon Fleet was heading on back,
They’d been to the very same place!

‘They sent a message to us as well,
Were sending a crew to attack,
They said we wouldn’t get out alive,
We couldn’t put up with that!
We blasted Earth to a thousand bits
That are floating out by the stars,
They’ll never be threatening us again…
Come on, we’ll race you to Mars!’

David Lewis Paget

I never can look when I’m riding past
The ruin of Falconridge,
I turn the head of my horse away
When I cross the Narrows Bridge,
And I concentrate on the countryside,
Try not to think of Clair,
Or the simple stone where she lies alone
Beneath its towers there.

But now and then I will think again
Of her and her sister Ruth,
Of the happy days when we used to play
In the dim days of our youth,
We would picnic out in the meadows
And I would chase them over the bridge,
For a kiss or two, though I came to rue
The House of Falconridge!

For Ruth was the elder of the two
And should have been first in line,
She grew to a haughty damosel
So I wouldn’t make her mine,
But Clair was bubbly, full of fun
And she showed she really cared,
So I knew that she was the only one
From the love that we had shared.

‘You will not marry my sister Clair,
I must be the first one wed,
I’ll not be seen as unwanted, left
To cry alone in my bed.’
So Ruth petitioned her father that
He halt our marriage plans,
But he had shrugged off his daughter,
‘This affair is out of my hands!’

The Banqueting Hall in Falconridge
Was decked with flags and flowers,
While Ruth went muttering her dismay
And hid in one of the towers,
She didn’t come out for the service
Though she did come out for the ball,
But sat and glowered at Clair, as we
Had danced our way round the hall.

Their father brought in the caterers
From the other side of the lake,
And they had wheeled in the greatest prize,
A huge five layered cake,
The tiny figures of bride and groom
Stood proudly on the top,
Then Ruth had suddenly come awake,
Leapt up and shouted, ‘Stop!’

The guests had stared, and a sudden hush
Befell the Banqueting Hall,
As Ruth seized both the bride and the groom
And dashed them against the wall,
She seized the knife from the wedding cake
And screamed in a long, high note:
‘I hate you all at this wedding ball!’
Then stabbed my Clair in the throat.

She ran right out of the Banqueting Hall,
I held poor Clair in my arms,
The blood poured over my wedding suit
As they called the Master-At-Arms,
She locked herself in the Northern Tower
And she lit a fire by the door,
Then ran right up to the topmost room,
Lay wailing, there on the floor.

The fire spread up through the Northern Tower
As Clair expired in my arms,
I couldn’t see through the veil of tears
How the guests had fled in alarm,
‘My love, my love,’ she had sighed at last
‘I forgive my sister Ruth,
We shouldn’t have taken her place away,
We wronged her, that is the truth!’

The fire raged, and burnt to a shell
The whole of Falconridge,
But Ruth they found, blackened and burned
As her flesh peeled off in strips,
She’s locked in one of the tower rooms
Will be locked in there for life,
With her claw-like hands and melted face
But it won’t bring back my wife!

I had a mirror placed by the door
She can see herself through the bars,
She has to suffer as I have done
By looking out on her scars,
And from the ruin of Falconridge
You may hear her cry, somehow,
When the Moon is over the Narrows Bridge:
‘Who will marry me now?’

David Lewis Paget