The little boy with the shining eyes
Was skipping along the street,
They said that he was autistic, that
He never would learn to speak,
He laughed and played in the open air
And he chattered away inside,
But he couldn’t utter a single word
That anyone recognised.
His mind was cluttered with happy thoughts
Of colours and sounds and things,
He couldn’t make sense of the what-they-were
Or anyone’s utterings,
He thought they spoke in a special tongue
That nobody understood,
They kept on saying the same old thing,
‘Now Oliver, you be good!’
He thought that ‘Ubble ee yuli dood,’
Was the sound of a creaking chair,
Or maybe the voice of a ‘Wotsigot’
When his mother was tearing her hair,
His father would just say ‘Geepimin’
When he wanted to go out late,
And she’d say, ‘Wotdid yalass slayv dyeov?’
Locking the garden gate.
He’d learned to scale the iron fence
That was built to keep him in,
And he took his chattering Umblevorks
That were gambolling within,
He filled the street with his Landyplatts
Where they lay on every lawn,
Waiting to play with the neighbour’s cats
That he knew as Gratzendorn.
But down the road was a nasty man
With a name like Hubbrygast,
Who would grab the lad by the scruff of the neck
And drag him home at last,
‘Keep your idiot son at home,
Away from my place, at least,
If I catch him out on the road again
I’ll be calling the local police.’
The day was Doodly Wangle with
The Flubber up in the Guy,
When Hubbrygast saw a Landyplatt
From the corner of his eye,
The boy was singing a Wollygong
To a two-tone Grindlepick,
When Hubbrygast poked the Landyplatt
With the sharp point of a stick.
The Landyplatt gave a gorble that
Had enraged the Umblevorks,
And Hubbrygast was surrounded by
His own sharp garden forks,
They poked and prodded and brought him down
‘Til the nasty man had bled,
While a bright red volluping Corple
With a *****, took off his head.
The people hide in their houses when
The boy comes out to play,
And nobody tries to speak to him,
They wouldn’t know what to say,
They weave their way through the Landyplatts
That have taken over the street,
And try to avoid the Umblevorks
That chatter, under their feet.
David Lewis Paget
