I’ve devoted my life to poetry
Whenever I’ve had the time,
Created whole towns and villages
And even the people rhyme.
There’s only supposed to be six plots
In the stories we have to tell,
And half of them aim for heaven, while
The rest of them end in hell.

But I’ve written fourteen hundred tales
And each of them has a plot,
With climaxes in the middle, and
A twist in the tail, or not.
There’s anger, love and revenge in there
Mixed in the poetic stew,
And some of the plots are quite threadbare,
But they’re all written for you.

My women are all quite beautiful,
My men are as hard as nails,
They constantly search for love, I find,
In all of my paper trails.
But most have an itch they have to scratch,
For some of them there’s regret,
They pay the cost when a lover’s lost
And it haunts their stories yet.

I often scribble in witches, ghouls,
And spirits that have no souls,
That hover around the edges, with
Their indeterminate goals.
I look to the distant future now
For tales you’ll never forget,
And trust to fate that it’s not too late
For a million stories yet.

David Lewis Paget