jumping
hopping
bounding
springing
kangaroos are jumping and hopping high
their bounding springing touches the sky

My brother was twelve years older so
I knew him not so well,
But heard of him in the taverns,
Getting drunk, and raising hell,
My mother said, ‘Keep away from him,’
And I did, for many years,
But blood is blood, and a brother should
Help out, though it ends in tears.

He’d done a spot of embezzling,
He’d picked the pockets of Earls,
You never left him to tend a horse
And he wasn’t safe with girls,
But he was my brother Toby,
And I was his brother Tim,
I’d often find him beneath my bed
When he said, ‘Don’t let them in!’

By ‘them’ he had meant the Runners
Who were active in the Bow,
And some of the old Thief-Takers
With their ruffians in tow,
They roamed the streets with their cudgels
And would lie, just out of sight,
Beyond the doors of the Taverns, when
They turned them adrift at night.

The streets were mean, and were far from clean
Where my brother used to roam,
Despite the pleas of our mother, who
Would beg him to come back home,
But father remained unbending, said
His eldest son was a swine,
‘His endless scrapes, a Jackanapes!
He is no son of mine!’

I heard he’d taken a horse and fled
From a stables in the Strand,
‘There’s little that anyone now can do,
When they catch him, he’ll be hanged!’
My mother, crying a flood of tears
As my father cursed and swore,
‘I’ll call the Runners, or I’ll be ******
If you let him through my door!’

So Toby galloped to Hounslow Heath
Along the Great West Road,
Teamed up with the brute Tom Wilmot,
Lay low in his abode,
They’d venture out on a moonlit night
To wait for the latest Stage,
But Tom was never the gentleman,
Or known to contain his rage.

They stopped the coach on a lonely night
‘Your money or your life!’
Dragged out a country gentleman,
His maid, and his homely wife,
He wanted the ring on the lady’s hand
But her finger held it tight,
So he sawed the finger off as well
With a sharp, serrated knife.

‘It was terrible,’ Toby told me
As they loaded him onto the cart,
‘The screams and the blood, unholy,’
As the horse was about to depart,
They hung him high on the Tyburn Tree
Next to the Wilmot pig,
Not undeserved, but I cried and cursed
As he danced the Tyburn jig.

David Lewis Paget

falling
pouring
drenching
soaking
rain drops falling and pouring so hard
their drenching soaking doth flood my yard

flying
winging  
gliding  
soaring
an eagle flying and winging high
his gliding soaring so majestic

Concise
Device
Advice
Entice
A peculiar devise concise in
function. Often advice entice woe.

tweeting
chirping
singing
trilling
valleys full of tweeting chirping birds
all of them singing trilling sweet words

Lovely
Lively
Deathly
Blithely
Step to fall with Lovely, Lively care.
Love, I take your Deathly, Blithely dare.

trembling
shaking
rocking
crashing
neath the ground trembling shaking most stout  
all things rocking and crashing about

Midterm
Winter
Ample
Sweaters
                 Through our midterms, we now have winter
                 Globe's ample warming--must haves: sweaters.

It was the day of the wedding of Mr and Mrs Epithalamium they looked quite the Heroic Couplet and full of Romanticism until the Englyn  Prose-d the Questionku ‘ Do you take this woman’ …  then in a wavering Iambic Pentameter voice the groom whispered ‘I do not know’ ….Mrs Epithalamium felt quite Dizain and tried to scratch out his Ruba’I, the  Clerihew stepped forward to comfort her but tripped over some Concrete and felt like a right Cowboy. The brides father, the Russian Chastushka, grabbed the groom and with a  Carpe Diem attitude threatened to Choka him.

            The guests all gathered in an Enclosed Rhyme with the best man making quite a Dramatic Monologue, the brides mother had her  Hybronnet knocked off her head and the chief bridesmaid had her Kimo torn in the affray. The young flower girls Haibun and Hamd both burst into tears as their Crown of Sonnets were totally destroyed.

            The Rev. Pantoum pleaded for calm, then repeating his plea for the melee to stop started making a List of the damage, quick as a Ghazal and with great Imagism he protected the Crystalline glass from smashing into Ninette pieces. Meanwhile the poor bride was in a state of Nonet anxiously trying to get past the twins Munaajaat and Musaddas, her Idyll life had been turned upside down, today was the day she had hoped to change her Name to Triolet.

              Alliteration watched while women wept, then stepped forward and with a Lyric in his voice asked people to calm down, he told everyone he had Naat come here to watch a display such as this and suggested they went for a hot Canzone to discuss the next move, Tanka and Tyburn readily agreed as they were very hungry and particularly as it was Free Verse it meant they could eat as much as they wanted. The nearly bride couldn’t give a Sijo if she never saw her ex again she was sick of being Kyrielle to and did not want anyone else’s Epyllion and with a final Than-Bauk stormed out of the club…


© 6/4/2013

The winter fogs roll in from the Thames
While frost forms up on the eaves,
The damp will settle in aching bones,
While the trees are bereft of leaves;
The streets were stark in the old East End
A footfall echoed and died,
And nights when the homes were shuttered in
They listened to wheels outside.

A Landau, black as the devil’s sin
And drawn by a single horse,
Rolled slowly up to The Black Dog Inn
By the side of the watercourse,
When out there came from the ***** house
In black from her head to tail,
A dollymop with a nosegay,
Wearing a bonnet, black, with a veil.

She’d climb up into the Landau while
The coachman, clad in a cloak,
Would give one flick with the reins,
And pull on the bit ‘til the horse had choked,
He’d take them off with a clatter
Wheels a-rattle on cobblestones,
His eyes agleam like a demon
While he whipped the horse to the bone.

The horse’s hooves on the cobbles
Warned ahead through the fog and mist,
As people cowered in doorways
Shouted a curse as the Landau passed,
They followed the glow of the gaslamps
Shedding their weak and feeble light,
And raced by the mighty river
Into the dark of the endless night.

They came to a halt at Wapping
Down where the river cast its spawn,
The bodies of dead and drowned who’d
Cursed their mothers for being born,
And hung on poles at the river’s edge
Was another terrible sight,
The bodies of sailor mutineers
That swung in their chains at night.

Hung on the Tyburn gallows
Then cut down and shackled again,
The bodies were coated with tallow
For a post mortem hanging in chain,
They’d bind them up with a winding cloth
Then coat them again in tar,
Hang them in chains at the riverside
‘Til their dust blew near and far.

The woman climbed out of the Landau
Took one look, and fell to her knees,
Her lover hung gently swaying,
Swaying in time to the river breeze,
His eyes stared out from the candle wax
And his mouth was shaped in an ‘Oh!’
He seemed to be saying, ‘Goodbye, my love;
What a terrible way to go!’

She wept like a woman demented,
Seized his legs, and pulled to her breast,
Clung to his swinging figure
Moaned like a creature, quite obsessed,
She tried transferring her warmth to him
But his cold was the cold of death,
And his eyes stared straight ahead of him
No thoughts, no love, no breath!

She climbed back into the Landau
As the coachman whipped it away,
And often at night they hear it go,
Those folks down Wapping way,
They say it spattered a stream of blood
On the road as it raced on by,
From the dollymop who’d slashed her throat
And lay in the coach to die.

And when there’s a mighty river fog
In the winter, down by the Thames,
They sit in the Inn they call Black Dog
And they drink to the health of friends,
They drink to the ones who’ve gone before
As they hear the wheels outside,
And hold their breath at the emptiness
As the door is opened wide!

David Lewis Paget

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.

This stay of execution is but one more of life's illusions and we fall to be included in the list,I have kissed the Blarney stone and wept by the wailing wall and muttered mass upon the dead along the way,disputed with those executed on old Tyburn's gallow,brought forth the fallow field into the yielding of a crop and never once slowed down or stopped, with the madness of that certainty that there will be much more to see before the guillotine begins its drop.
Before this day and underneath this sky which umbrellas me against the onslaught of the coming night,I have pledged my troth to thee with one madness of that certainty that all will come to me,
the one who waits.

La hache ? Non. Jamais. Je n'en veux pour personne.
Pas même pour ce czar devant qui je frissonne,
Pas même pour ce monstre à lui-même fatal.
Qui supprime Tyburn abolit White-Hall ;
Et quand la mort, ouvrant son désastreux registre,
Me dit : - Que jettes-tu dans ce panier sinistre ?
Ou la tête du peuple, ou la tête du roi ?
Je dis : - Ni celle-ci, ni celle-là. - Ma loi,
C'est la vie ; et ma joie, ô Dieu, c'est l'aube pure.
Je ne suis pas de ceux qui font la pourriture ;
Je ne suis pas de ceux qui donnent à manger
Au sépulcre, où l'on voit ramper et s'allonger
L'affreux sarcopte éclos du miasme délétère ;
Je ne suis pas de ceux vers qui les vers de terre,
Béants, tournent leur tête aveugle dans la nuit. ...

When you’ve swept
the last frozen pea from your freezer…
and you’ve made the last batch of tallow candles
from the beef dripping of your last big meal…
and the already flickering light dims
and finally goes out…
You’ll just be scavenging from dawn
till dusk for sustenance...
And there's not much more about!

You’ll hear stories - word of mouth
‘cos the telly doesn’t work anymore,
of someone seeing the last truck
rolling North out of Dover…
All the diesel’s run out that used to power
the ferries and the trucks.
That last lorry was waylaid by looters…
But it was only carrying toilet rolls anyway!

Boris Johnson’s twitching figure still hangs
from the newly erected gibbet at Tyburn.
There will be a queue…
The next to step up and face their maker
Gove, Patel, Hancock or Raab…
“No, no… after you” being herded…
by refreshed & re-enrolled Hell’s Angels…
like Ravens and Vultures after a plague…

Amazon will be down to just one staffer.
He’s waiting for today’s single order -
from a techie in the Hebrides.
One who has built himself a generator from fuse wire
and washed up plastic waste.
He’ll be after a PS5 that runs on his private solar energy…
He can use it for 10 minutes each day after sundown
order before sunset - be ready - in haste.

I won’t go on… but you get the picture.
And, yet…In spite of life being a
well choreographed ****-show,
living & breathing...
(slowly…because you’ll use up all the Oxygen)
well, it still remains popular!

Happy New Year folks!

Jack Rann was a simple man ,
as the rich got richer he found a simple plan .
To bleed money from the rich the best he could

In the market place a pick pocket be ,
but even that wasn’t enough for he.
For the wealthy walked by with their heads in the air ,
they didn’t look down ,
and never saw him there .

So to the stage coach he rode both  day and night ,
with hardly a wink he rode through the night ,
on hay did he lay with his steed at his side .

All the money his clients spent on good food every night ,
and where did he lay his head ?
by his horse by his bed .

Each night he heard them in laughter and joke ,
drinking and singing telling a ***** joke !

All that money did he watch going from hand to fist ,
and he had it not ,
not a dime not a stitch .

So to his faithful horse he took ,
Jack the nine tails around his silk breeches .

rode this land with a grin and a smile ,
a pistol and a cunning plan to charm the ladies and gentleman of
their wealth as they passed by ,
was Jack the nine tales scoundrel .


Then one day to such bad luck ,
the Duke was like a sitting duck .

In chains he faced the gallows there ,
the flowers he wore  when he was there ,
around his silk breeches .
Jiggled a jig as the noose pulled tight ,
at tyburn the gin ran over that night .

But who could forget this lad with a wink ,
who hung by a noose by the dance of a jig ?
hung at Tyborn tree .