She always seemed to run on ahead,
Skipping, prancing and dancing,
All the way to the Goblin’s Wood
While I followed on, romancing.
She never seemed to see me at all
Though she was my only vision,
The only feature that filled my world
Right through to the intermission.

She wore her hair in a plaited braid
That jiggled along behind her,
And left a trail like a dragon’s tail
So bright that the light would blind her,
But I was mesmerised by the legs
That danced in a crazy pattern,
They moved too fast for the man who begs
Or the girl that they call a slattern.

I’d see her shadow between the trees
As it weaved and it side-slipped gladly,
Whipping the pale white flight of the breeze
As the leaves whirled around her, madly,
Then all the denizens of the wood
Would come to the sight entrancing,
Dressed in the garb of the neighborhood
I’d leave them behind me, dancing.

‘Come out, come out,’ would the Goblins shout
But she’d leave them behind her, whirling,
The old ones suffered from reams of gout
And would sit with their hair there, curling,
I live in hopes that she’ll turn to me
When her dance has become more mellow,
Entwined around the mystery tree
Her dress fading green to yellow.

They call her Summer, but Autumn shades
Seem they’re a long time coming,
The leaves are skittering down like blades
In a part of the year that’s slumming,
The breeze is cool as I call her in
From the dance that she’s in the making,
While I, contented, await the sin
She keeps in the oven, baking.

David Lewis Paget

The castle was smaller than I’d thought
In the Scottish countryside,
It sat in a hollow called Claymore Court
Where all the defenders died,
The signs of cannon, pounding the towers
Were there in the crumbled walls,
And shrubs grew out of the rubbled bowers
While trees took root in the halls.

I sensed a touch of hostility
The moment I reached the gate,
For Angus’s friendability
Came on just a little late,
We’d both attended the Priory School
But that had been way back then,
And I, in parting, called him a fool,
He wouldn’t remember when.

But he did us proud with a suckling pig
And a quart of ‘**** o’ the North’,
Marie, who knew him, was ever so big
And sat with me, holding forth.
I had no mind that he felt so strong,
I’d have left the woman at home,
He had this feeling I’d done him wrong
When I coaxed Marie to roam.

And there she sat with a month to go
Way out in front with our bairn,
I didn’t know it would crease him so
But there, you live and you learn.
He coaxed her drink, with a dreadful leer
Pressed on her **** o’ the North,
It wasn’t as if she was drinking beer
Or water, for all that it’s worth.

We went to bed in a tower room
When the moon rose over the glen,
It felt to me like a Highland tomb
As it was to my clan back then,
Marie began to moan in the night
That the bairn was coming forth,
It had a skinful, thanks to Marie
Of that liquor, **** o’ the North.

And Angus heard and he came to gloat
When he heard that she couldn’t hold,
I dropped him there, head first in the moat
To a grave both wet and cold.
Marie and I, we sit in the barn
And the blame swings back and forth,
What price my friend, and a helpless bairn
To a jar of **** o’ the North?

David Lewis Paget

I spend my time in the graveyard of
St. Martin’s in the Fields,
Cleaning the moss off the headstones
Just to read what damp reveals,
The local vicar has let them go
And the graveyard’s overgrown,
As creepers cover the finer points
Of the lives now dead and gone.

And some of the stones have fallen down,
Some of them on their face,
Showing their stories to the ground
That wouldn’t reveal a trace,
I heave and jemmy them back upright
Under the noonday sun,
Then read the inscriptions in the light,
Long hidden from every one.

The work is slow and exhausting but
It gives of its own reward,
They say that it stops the haunting by
The ones that are being ignored,
The graveyard dips down into a dell
And spreads through the willow trees,
With some of the graves so covered up
I get to them on my knees.

And some of them have been there so long
That the tops have fallen in,
Opening up the coffin lids
To the skull’s unholy grin,
I sometimes cover the aging bones,
Then I sometimes leave them be,
It all depends if they made amends
Once I know each history.

But one I found in that shaded dell
Made the hairs crawl up my back,
I raised the stone when I was alone
When I should have called for Jack,
For there on the new raised frontage
Was a scene from a dream of hell,
A demon, wearing a flowing cloak
And with sharpened claws as well.

She stared from the stone of granite
Her horns stood out on her head,
Someone had carved her figure there
To give us a sense of dread,
Her teeth were those of a vampire bat
Protruding out of the mud,
And only once I had wiped them off
Could I see the signs of blood.

And then I read the inscription:
‘Here lies the Lady Vamp,
She lured her victims into the woods
Disguised as a willing *****,
Then once inside she would tear their throats,
It looked like a beast of prey,
So no-one thought to look for her till
She’d given herself away.’

‘A soldier came on her sleeping
While she was covered in blood,
Her victim’s throat was in keeping
With a vampire loose in the wood,
He sharpened a stake from a sapling
And stood for a moment, apart,
Then turned in a burst of fury,
Thrusting the stake through her heart.’

The top of her coffin had fallen in
I saw, with the creeper aside,
And there lay the vampire, staring at me
As if from the day that she died,
The stake was ****** in through the ribcage there
She’d helplessly reached with a claw,
And tried to remove, to seek a reprieve
From what she was dying for.

I’m not superstitious, I should be, I know,
And in that there lies my mistake,
I reached through that rotten, coffin lid so
I’d get a good grip on the stake,
I pulled it out swiftly, and gave it a twist,
A foul wind blew in, like a breeze,
And I was aware of a woman who watched,
Stood silently there by the trees.

David Lewis Paget

I wish that we’d never found it now,
I wish that we’d stayed away,
Avoided the twisted mansion that
Was fashioned in Cromwell’s day,
But we were just a couple of lads
Out there, and having fun,
We wouldn’t have thought to change the world,
Nor hurt just anyone.

The place sat deep in a bluebell wood
Surrounded by a marsh,
I said, ‘Should we?’ and he said we should,
My friend was a little harsh,
We waded up to our knees out there
Until we reached the porch,
The rooms within were as dark as sin
Till Joe took out his torch.

The house had once been a splendid place
Though the floors were deep in mud,
Of fetes and ***** there was still a trace
Then the fields submerged in flood,
The house sank on its foundations then
No doubt, to cries and tears,
Its noble crew had deserted it
For all of two hundred years.

I raced my friend to the stairway that
Led up from the central hall,
Half of the rail had fallen away,
Was resting against the wall,
When up above in a tiny room
Stood a bureau, finely made,
Inlaid with delicate parquetry
That lay concealed in the shade.

But over the lintel of the door
Was the carving of a man,
His wings spread wide, with the sharpest claw,
He was from some evil clan,
His teeth protruded over his lip
And his eyes were fierce and black,
I caught at Joe and he almost tripped
But he shrugged, and turned his back.

And on the dust of the bureau lay
A long, fine feather quill,
I knew I shouldn’t disturb it there
But I thought, ‘I can, I will!’
And beside the quill was a manuscript
In an old and faded hand,
Calling for the death of a king
That I couldn’t understand.

I knew, I’d read in my history books
That a cruel, evil one,
A man called Oliver Cromwell had
Caused pain for everyone,
He’d raised a citizens’ army and
Had thought to **** the king,
But fell to the King’s Own Cavaliers,
Was beheaded in the spring.

I knew this, yet I still signed my name
With that awesome feather quill,
It seemed to have me so hypnotised
That I quite had lost my will,
So then when a roll of thunder shook
The house right through to the floor,
The man in black that was carved, alack,
Came bursting in through the door.

He snatched at the parchment manuscript
And let out a howl of glee,
Then screamed, ‘I’ve waited forever just
To play with your history.’
I know that you think the civil war
Took the head of a rightful King,
But how could I know the power of a quill
That could upturn everything?

David Lewis Paget

He waited until the Moon was high
And its beam shone on the sand,
Telling himself the time was nigh
He could overcome the land,
But everyone slept beneath the Moon,
Their minds were out of reach,
Except for the girl who stayed awake
And wandered along the beach.

Her mind was a well of confusion
There was love and there was pain,
She’d only done it the once, she thought,
But never she would again,
She thought of the sense of boundless joy
It gave when the love was there,
And how it crashed like a broken toy
When it gave way to despair.

And all the while he had watched the girl
From his vantage point on high,
Peering from his coal-black wings
In the dark of the evening sky,
Her thoughts he was carefully sifting
To glean what he could of use,
‘What was this thing called love,’ he thought,
‘It must be a term of abuse!’

And then a panicky wave of pain
Had hit him out of the blue,
How could she feel such love again
When the pain came seeping through,
He tried to stop but he couldn’t block
She was too intense for that,
His wings were quivering, dark and shivering
Like a giant bat.

He tried to impress his mind on her
As often he’d done before,
But found that distress was more or less
What she was looking for,
She dumped her pain in the darkening sky
And thought that she saw some wings,
As he crashed into a raging sea
In wonder at what love brings.

David Lewis Paget

He’d never forgotten the heap of ****
That sat beside the mine,
It blocked the sun from his morning walk
With its shadow, so sublime,
It grew to hover above his home
From the time that he was three,
Its overpowering vastness grew
Not slow, but steadily.

And every time that the wind would blow
Its dust would fill the air,
Would saturate every cranny, even
Darken his mother’s hair,
The coal dust strangled their garden bed
So not a thing would grow,
And filled up his father’s lungs with dust
Each time that he went below.

The more that they mined the deeper coal
The higher it grew, the heap,
It spread away from the poppethead
Was covering up the street,
They tried to manage the monster but
It grew out of control,
With every truckload of **** they dumped
From where they mined the coal.

At night it loomed like a giant bat
With its shadow on the ground,
Gleaming black in the moon’s pale beam
It terrorised the town,
‘I don’t like walking at night out there,’
You’d hear the women say,
‘That heap is covering Satan’s lair
We need to get away.’

But nobody ever got away,
At least, not with their soul,
They’d sold their souls to the devil, and
Were tied to the monster, coal,
The men came home with their faces black
And their hands all scarred and torn,
For coal mining is the sort of job
You are cursed with, when you’re born.

And he was taken to work the mine
When he’d barely turned just six,
His father said, ‘Well, I think it’s time,
You can leave behind your tricks,’
They showed him how he could work the fan
To fill the mine with air,
And there he worked twelve hours a day
While he learned the word ‘Despair’.

His father died when a prop collapsed
And they had to leave him there,
Under a hundred tons of coal
But the owners didn’t care,
They simply began another drive
To make up the owner’s loss,
Whether the miners lived or died
Their lives were seen as dross.

So Andrew, that was the orphan’s name
Went down between the shifts,
He took some fuel and matches down
He’d long been planning this,
He managed to start a coal seam fire
That roared by the morning sun,
And smoke poured out of that poppethead,
While they raged, ‘What has he done?’

But Andrew never emerged again
To pay for the thing he’d done,
He’d told his sister to write a note,
‘I did it for everyone!’
His bones lie charred where his father fell,
Under a hundred ton,
They couldn’t put out the coal seam fire,
The father lies with the son.

David Lewis Paget

I hated to pass the talking tree,
It made me feel all undone,
Raveling on in its revery
Like a racquet, coming unstrung,
What made it worse was the silken voice
Not matching a stringybark’s,
If I’d been offered a simple choice
I’d rather the voice was harsh.

It tried to attract my attention there
Each time I ventured to pass,
‘What are you going to do, just stare?’
It said, ‘Well, kiss my ***!’
It always tried to embarrass me
By being uncouth, and loose,
I said, ‘You’re surely the rudest tree,
We haven’t been introduced.’

It quoted Coleridge by the ream
Whenever I wore my hat,
‘A painted ship on a painted sea,
Now what do you think of that?’
‘I don’t know where you borrowed that line
I said, I have no notion, it’s
“As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean!”’

It used to sulk when it got it wrong
To wave its trunk with a clatter,
‘Who’d believe,’ it would say to me,
‘That getting it right would matter?’
‘I think He would, old S.T.C.
Would listen, hear, and note it,
Nor be impressed that a talking tree
Would get it wrong, and quote it.’

I turned up there with a saw one day
And the talking tree had cried,
‘I say, I’m not going to cut you down,’
I said, but it knew I lied.
For ‘April is the cruellest month,’
I said, and I wasn’t kidding,
I saw through its Eliot, silence its Pound
And cut off its Little Gidding.

David Lewis Paget