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Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!
Rescue my Castle, before the hot day
Brightens the blue from its silvery grey,

(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”

Ride past the suburbs, asleep as you’d say;
Many’s the friend there, will listen and pray
“God’s luck to gallants that strike up the lay,

(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”

Forty miles off, like a roebuck at bay,
Flouts Castle Brancepeth the Roundheads array:
Who laughs, Good fellows ere this, by my fay,

(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”

Who? My wife Gertrude; that, honest and gay,
Laughs when you talk of surrendering, “Nay!
I’ve better counsellors; what counsel they?”

(Chorus) “Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!”
The sky was a smudge-coloured blue up there
When the sailing ship came in,
With full top gallants and spinnaker flared
Full flight from a world of sin,
The mermaid carved on her prow was proud
As she breasted the salt-licked spray,
Her hair a-stream, as the waves she ploughed
And surged to Ascension Bay.

I’d watched her approach from the Sailor’s Rest
That lay way up on the cliff,
‘It isn’t a question of when,’ he’d said,
‘Nor even a question of if!
The ghost of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’
Comes in with a clear blue sky,
It happens but once a year,’ he’d said
‘On the twenty-fifth of July!’

I’d laughed at him in the ‘Admiral’s Arms’
As he swallowed his seventh ale,
While others listened with frightened eyes
Each face was a shade of pale,
‘You’ll see it best from the Sailor’s Rest,
That ruin, up on the cliff,
But don’t get caught by the devil’s cohort
Swarming up from the ship.’

They’d scaled the cliff to the Sailor’s Rest,
I knew the story of old,
Had slain the crew of the ‘Captain Teck’,
Or so it was always told,
They’d left the ‘Rest’ in a sea of flames
For the sake of an ancient feud,
While ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’ lay wrecked
By the mutineers that crewed.

They’d seized young Molly, the serving girl
Who’d worked at the Sailor’s Rest,
Had pulled her hair and had pinned her down,
Exposed the girl at the breast,
They took their pleasure and dragged her out
To the edge of the cliff, and pale,
Then flung her screaming down to the deck
Of ‘The Falls of Borrowdale’.

And so it was that I lay with the glass
So firmly fixed to my eye,
Up on the cliff by the Sailor’s Rest
On the twenty-fifth of July,
The ghostly ship flew into the shore
Under a mass of sail,
No sign of the crew, no lookout stood
On watch at the forward rail.

The ship ground up on the Daley Rocks
Rose shrieking, up in the air,
Her timbers creaking and groaning with
The mermaid’s look of despair,
The crew poured out of the lower decks
And flung themselves overboard,
These phantoms, straight from the devil’s lair
To put good men to the sword.

I ran some way from the Sailor’s Rest
Lay under a bush, and hid,
I didn’t know what to do for the best
But watched, to see what they did,
They swarmed all over the Sailor’s Rest
Put everyone to the sword,
Then dragged poor Molly out on the grass
And I cried, ‘Please stop them, Lord!’

Then the phantoms stopped as they heard my cry
And they turned, each black as sin,
Molly let out a quivering sigh
And they burst in flames, within,
She stood alone at the edge of the cliff
And she waved, no longer pale,
While the mermaid smiled on the prow of the ship,
‘The Falls of Borrowdale.’

David Lewis Paget
Stanley Wilkin Feb 2017
A rude dawn over the city
Where Pepys once fought with his beautiful wife
After seducing whatever servant-girl chanced
To be around, where kings
First ruled from cold castles full of cockroaches,
Murderous cousins
Lurking through the baleful halls of history
Eyeing the empty throne. The stinking
River long shorn of fish sweeps elegantly before
The crimson petticoats of multiple ******
Promenading along Thames Street,
Winking at under-washed gallants.

Vauxhall gardens a pithy cavalcade of priests and doxies,
Of flower girls, flaxen haired girls selling fruit,
Anxious to reach home before the ****** hour of early
Evening when beaus gather in alley ways establishing
A testosterone gauntlet in the dust-spawned gloom.

The road to Tyburn is littered with lost hopes!
On hanging day bodies swung like debutantes dancing
To jazz tunes-
Aristocrats quartered with precision squealed like common folk,
Bleeding as much. The city watched all this
And didn’t murmur-never complained-
Smiled, as only a city can smile, at gin-drunk matrons, pie eating aldermen
And the ****** activity in street shadows by relieved young women on
VE day 1945.
Folks, I want to tell you a story
About some brave men, men who gave
          their lives
For the cause of Freedom, men who
          left wives
And children, so that people like you
          and me
Could breathe air rich with the glory
Of human sacrifice given for their
          fellow
Man: --- Folks, the story of the Alamo!

      In Eighteen hundred and Thirty-
          six,
In San Antonio, Texas,
A hundred and eighty-some-odd men,
In late winter of that year, would try
          to fend
Off some four thousand Mexican
          troops
At an old, former Catholic church
          called the Alamo.
Headed by the shrimp, Generalissimo
Santa Anna, the Mexicans, camped in
          groups
Around the makeshift fortress, were
          determined
To capture it, and it concerned them
Not whether the takeo'er was done
          thru surrender
Or destruction. The Texans would
          defender her,
Howe'er, down to the very last man,
And it would be the Alamo's last stand.
          ---

     The cause of the battle may be
          stated briefly
For it was a reason as old as
          Humanity:
A tyrant declares the freedoms of old
          are abolished
And his new powers must be
          acknowledged:
The Constitution of Eighteen twenty-
          four
Was swept away and replaced with a
          dictator sore:
The men of the Alamo then showed
         their defiance,
With God and Right for their Reliance.
         ---

     Now, tho the situation was
        hopeless,
And the Alamo was certain to fall,
Three fiercely independent men
        would stand tall,
And lead the defenders, and with a
         boldness
Hardly equaled in the annals of
         Human History,
They all valorously engaged the
         hateful enemy.
        
     Jim Bowie was there, knife and all,
Leading a rag-tag band of volunteers,
And tho he was sickly, bedrid, too, his
         peers
Would stand by him and come
         running to his call.
     Davy Crockett, a legend in his own
         time,
From Tennessee he came to fight
         alongside
The Texan Revolutionaries,
And become one of Law and Order's
         luminaries.
     William Travis, at age twenty-six,
         he
Was the young colonel, who, with the
         fateful breath
Of courage, laid down the sentiment
         tingly
Of all those Patriots with the fearless
         words, "Victory or Death!"

     Now, come Sunday, the Sixth of
         March, ere dawn,
In ice-cold weather, the hell-bent foe,
Prodded by a pulsating but fruitless
         siege
That caused not one of those gallants
         to cringe,
Launched a mindless, all-out assault
         on the Alamo.
With cannons and rifles flaring, with
         swords drawn,
Heroically, the men inside the battered
         mission
Were putting scores of Mexicans out of
         commission
As they greeted the tumultuous
         onslaught.
O! the bloodletting that was spilt as
         they fought!
The tidal wave of red uniforms scaling
The walls and being pushed back! --
         Failing! -- Failing! --
But then succeeding! as their great
         numbers
O'ercame the valiant but
         undermanned resistance.
Like an army of ants, the prodigious,
         pernicious persistence
Of the Mexicans paid off, as the
         Alamo's cumbers
They poured o'er. Hand-to-hand
         combat ensued,
 Until every single Texan stalwart was
         pursued,
And kilt! For ninety minutes, the Earth
         shook
On her axis, as the early mornin' Sun
         would brook
No interference of his sharp gaze
That on the momentous event he sent
         his rays
Faithful upon for want of deserved
         praise.

     The end had finally come: all the
         Texan
Warriors had died at the hands of the
         Mexican
Hostiles, but they did not perish
In vain! for, a deathblow was
         administered
On the abhorrent adversary --
         considered
One of the most repugnantly feverish
Armies e'er assembled -- in a
         Samsonian form,
For, for each Texan who the Jordan
         crossed and the Gates of Trust
Passed through, eight Mexicans bit the
         dust: ---
The Alamo fell, 'tis true, but Texas was
         born!

Now, my friends, no story about the
         Alamo would be complete
If the battle of the following month
         'twern't
Included: At the San Jacinto,
The Mexicans were taking a siesta,
When the Texan Army, under the
         tactical sheet
Of surprise, stormed them, and what
         that resting outfit heard,
Besides the fire of arms, was a war cry,
         cried
Louder and more powerful than that
         rising, sleepy-eyed
Belligerent could have e'er dreamed
         of, for --- lo! ---
It 'twere the God-like war cry of ... ----
         "Remember the Alamo!"

                         ---rmjt
Hana Mar 2013
I don’t understand how can anyone un-love someone.
Even more, claim that they never did.
I don’t understand how words can be taken back after they were said;
after they were cherished by the receiver.
I don’t understand how kind words are hardly truthful; hardly reliable; mostly deceivable.
I don’t understand how people can rob you of things
they gave and argue that it wasn’t yours.
I don’t understand how people have the gallants
to twists their words and fiddle about with them.
I don’t understand how some people can close their eyes off certain things,
refusing to accept the pain they granted.
Disregarding the effects of the slightest actions;
how significant it is to other people.
I don’t understand how they can be forgiven;
unburdened by guilt;
freed from traumas;
living life to the fullest.
While others suffer extensively from what they did.
She’d walk on out to the balcony
Each day that it didn’t hail,
Braving the bitterly cutting winds
In the search for a distant sail,
I’d wait ‘til she was shivering cold
And her lips were turning blue,
Then drag her in through the open door;
Well, what was I meant to do?

She’d cry, of course, as I thawed her out
By the small, *** belly stove,
The only thing that kept us alive
In that tiny, ice-bound cove,
I’d wrap a blanket around the form
That I’d loved since I was three,
While she looked out for the love she’d lost
And I’ll swear, it wasn’t me!

He’d gone away on a masted barque
With the winter coming in,
Had kissed her once as he went aboard
And swore he’d be back again,
He waved just once, then he turned his back
As the barque had sailed away,
Hauling on the top gallants as
It headed out from the bay.

The three of us had been ***** friends
Until Charles had gone to sea,
But only then had professed his love
For the love of my life, Marie,
I’d been too timid to state my love,
She saw me just as a friend,
I felt that my heart was broken, when
She turned to him in the end.

But I lived up on the cliff-top face
With a perfect view of the bay,
I’d see him first when he sailed back home
So she asked if she could stay,
She settled in, and my heart had grieved
As I watched her pale blue eyes,
Skimming the far horizon as
The rain had turned to ice.

The skies grew dark and the storms came in
And the sleet had turned to snow,
It covered all of the cliff-tops and
The sand on the cove below,
‘We’re in for a wicked winter,’ I
Remarked, as I chopped the wood,
And she had turned, to give me a smile
To say that she understood.

The weeks went by and the storms still came
Til the cove had turned to ice,
The sea froze out in the distant bay
While we passed the time with dice,
‘Isn’t it strange how fate decrees,’ she said
‘How love will lie…
What if it wasn’t Charlie, what
If it was you and I?’

The look on my face betrayed me, for
She sat right back and stared,
A tear had caught at my eye, she said,
‘Why didn’t you say you cared?’
‘I couldn’t see how you’d care for me
Though I cherished you as a friend,
I knew you would set your sights on Charles
And leave me in the end.’

‘You didn’t give me the choice, you should
Have left it for me to choose,
Now it’s a little too late for us,
What did you have to lose?’
She stomped on out to the balcony
Where the hail came down like rice,
And like a fool, I left her there
Til her tears had turned to ice.

I found her frozen, stuck to the rail
Where she stood and stared to sea,
I should have taken her in before
And she might have come to me,
But still she stands with her frozen hands
As a barque sails into the bay,
And Charles will see that she came to me;
What am I going to say?

David Lewis Paget
Life is Strange
Life is a constant punishment to persevere
Don not ask the value of pain and pleasure
But like a man one has to undergo and bear
At times its assaults one makes just to tear
Bunder under its veils it carries but treasure
No distinction is of the heretic and soothsayer
The lovers at times are but taken to just tear
Love dominates without being just in any fear

Gallants are those who take all but smilingly
In their own perception they are frank and,free
Whatever is predestined in life just let it be
We have to only jump in to this strange sea
There is no distinction whether you and me
Let us see whatever circumstances could be

Col Muhammad Khalid Khan
Copyright 2017 Golden Glow
Speaking Sorrow Jul 2016
The port vanishes beyond the horizon
As restless waves thrash against our ship

We’ve set sail,
The stars above
Guiding our every move.

The land behind escapes our view.
We ride on and on,
The furious storm in our path
Only one way to go
Only the strongest will last.

There are murmurs among the crew
Of mermaids waiting in the blue
And behind the ship’s wheel
I keep my thoughts concealed
As the rain begins fall,
I yell commands,
“Strike the royals!

And batten down the hatches!”

The rainfall grows heavy
As my heart

And the winds and waves continue their
Barrage against my ship

We strike both gallants
And reef the mainsail

And sail straight through the storm.


I am the Master of the Storm
You shall not take me down.

Fear makes for sunken ships
And in turn, sunken captains

I am fear itself
You will know it soon enough.
RedRiot Feb 2021
Take up the White Man’s burden—

Commit a deed so vile

Turn upside down their freedoms

Unrestrained, you beguile

In silence you creep and prey

On those that bare their hearts

They welcome you in with smiles

You steal their lives in parts

Take up the White Man’s burden

You claim to bring them light

With Western innovation

Instead you steal their right

To be a sovereign people

You think your ego grants

The theft of other cultures

You are not some gallants

Take up the White Man’s burden

And **** those who you mock

Your eyes cannot see color

Only justice that you block

They cry and they cannot breathe

Held underneath your knee

You say that they deserved it

But by whose accursed decree?

Take up the White Man’s burden

And claim to be your own

The talents that you covet

Your bitter farce has grown

But now your time has ended

Your lies have now unfurled

Now you will face as God’s wrath

The judgement of the world

— The End —