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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Lewis Paget