Author: Toastingfork

Not afraid to rhyme.

Fresh Pantoums, Only a Shilling !

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market stall
A Market Stall by Candlelight by Petrus van Schendel

Fresh Pantoums, Only a Shilling !

Oranges, lemons, and citrons and limes,
Cockles and mussels and oysters alive,
Tatler, Spectator, the Post and the Times,
Parsley and sage and sweet basil and chive !

Cockles and mussels and oysters alive,
Burgundy, claret, madeira and sack,
Parsley and sage and sweet basil and chive,
Cottons and calicos – red, white and black !

Burgundy, claret, madeira and sack,
Currants and raisins, sultanas and prunes,
Cottons and calicos, red, white and black,
Ballads and broadsides and tuppenny tunes !

Currants and raisins, sultanas and prunes,
Mercury powder to kill all your nits,
Ballads and broadsides and tuppenny tunes,
Coffee for merchants and lawyers and wits !

Mercury powder to kill all your nits,
Books for the scholar and books for the squire,
Coffee for merchants and lawyers and wits,
Labourers, porters and servants for hire !

Books for the scholar and books for the squire,
Scrag-end and brisket and trotters and bones,
Labourers, porters and servants for hire,
Heather for good-luck and Gypsy-charmed stones !

Scrag-end and brisket and trotters and bones,
News of the morning and news of the wars,
Heather for good-luck and Gypsy-charmed stones,
Come see my wares from the far-distant shores !

News of the morning and news of the wars,
Tatler, Spectator, the Post and the Times,
Come see my wares from the far-distant shores:
Oranges, lemons, and citrons and limes !

Overwrought & Undercooked

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close up of heart shape
Photo by freestocks.org on Pexels.com

Overwrought & Undercooked

“All teenagers write poetry, alas.”

– Ricky Rawlings

Verses for the writing-of than reading-out –
Verses, it is often said,
The better to be left unread
Than wallow in the gloomy, doomy Plath-itudes they spout.
Breaking rules because they’re rules,
And rhyming words that barely rhyme:
They have the will, they have the tools,
Yet cannot make their couplets chime.

So unpolished, and yet so smooth of face,
Just wide-eyed cynics unaware of what they can’t achieve –
So desperately earnest and so hopelessly naïve,
(With both the dots obsessively in place.)
Derivative and doctrinaire,
Just swotty, spotty pedants with delusions of a cosmic truth.
But honestly, we’ve all been there –
For ev’ry famous poet was an adolescent in their youth:

Torrid teenage Tennyson,
And Dylan-esque and Lennon-ish,
And shilly-shally Percy Bysshe
And happy Hardy, anyone ?
It’s true – I may not be as great
As any muse you care to rate,
But oh, when I was but a lad
I drivelled ev’ry bit as bad !

So sport your hearts out, mopey mop-heads-
Set our world to right by writing,
Set our toothless prose to biting –
Wither with your sneers and drop-deads.
Be yourselves and be your worst,
And wring out ev’ry beat and letter –
Never stop your foolish verse
Until your verse is better.

Nomen-Couture

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names

Nomen-Couture

There’s something strange about forenames
In the Anglophonic world –
We’re pretty relaxed about the unusual
(Like Sue for a boy and Manson for a girl).
I was saying as much
To Anglophone Sutch.

“Ah well,” he replied, “we’ve always been
So easy going in our names.
Indeed, we’re laissez-faire to a fault,
And sometimes turn our children into games.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t care –
Why, ask my daughter, Laissez-Faire !”

“Could it be a Protestant thing ?”
I asked him, but he shook his head.
“Denmark, Iceland, Germany,
Are just as strict as Spain” he said.
“But why not ask a registrar ?”
And so I turned to Proddy Parr.

“We’re under orders not to interfere,”
She told me, “more or less –
So just last week, I registered
An ‘Octopus’, a ‘Table’ and a ‘Mess’.
Little Britons set to make their mark,
Like ‘Superman’ and ‘Sharky-Shark’.”

“That said, we do have, on occasion,
Cause to be a prudent voice
To overly-creative parents,
When their child will have to bear their choice.
It only takes a quiet word
To stop a ‘Clitoris’ or ‘Turd’.”

“But by and large, we’re mostly made
Of Johns and Janes, and that’s okay –
We’ve got the choice, though, that’s the point !
It seems to work, so what they hey.”
And that is why, my darling child,
I named you Unverboten Wilde !

All Hallows Day

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hell
Relaxing in Hell by DisneyPsycho

All Hallows Day

I wonder what the First of November is like
In the depths of Hell ?
A day, perhaps, when demons all go on strike
And stay in their shell –
A lazy morning, then walking the three-headed dogs
And feeding the trolls,
Or taking the chance to restock the brimstone logs
And polish the skulls.
Packing the trident away along with the horns
For the rest of the year,
And binging on soaps with the grandkid-demonspawns
And an ice-cold beer.
And somewhere, in some office, some poor devil
Stares at a screen,
And starts to draw up plans at the management level
For next Halloween.

A Walk Through the End of Days

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apocalypse
The Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah by John Martin

A Walk Through the End of Days

I never thought Catastrophe
Would be as beautiful as this,
That Ragnarok at sunset
Is a moment of such bliss.
So peaceful is Apocalypse,
So languid is the End of Time –
The Armageddons come and go,
But were they ever this sublime ?

So come, my dear,
Come and let us stroll awhile,
To seek the lesser-spotted troll
That builds its nest beneath the stile,
As angels circle with the hawks,
And demons gad on Sunday walks,
And banshees squawk and phantoms play
And the Ending of the World’s a world away.

We’re told and told we’re living through
The cataclysmic Final Days:
Where wrath is wrought on wretched waifs
Who sup with Jews and gays.
Yet brimstone seems in short supply,
And so too human sacrifice –
Just people getting on with lives
Amid the unseen Antichrist.

So come, my dear,
Come and let us wend a path
That takes us further round the bend
To promised bloody aftermath.
Let’s walk with blacks and greens and reds
Before the sky falls on our heads,
And, hand-in-hand, let’s thread our way
Through the law-abiding wastes of Judgement Day.

Spider Spiters

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chalk spider

Spider Spiters

Innocent spiders close down schools
When ignorant humans panic.
Why the hell are we so prepared
To see them as Satanic ?
We wonder why our schools are broke,
And all our nerves are fried –
Yet choose which phobias we’ll stoke,
And wear our hates with pride –
It only takes the merest sight
To send us shrieking with delight.
Our fears are learned, and screeching
Just ain’t what our schools should teach in.

Far, far better we learn to love
The harmless ones, at least –
Let our babies play with monies,
Let our kids embrace the beast.
Rearing spinners out of eggs,
And never let the wolves repulse –
Daddy, bring a daddy-longlegs,
Mama, bring a widow-false –
Or better yet, we should be shown
To watch awhile, then leave alone.
And maybe then, here’s hoping,
Then the schools can all stay open.

The Ball-&-Socket Ball

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dance of death
Dance of Death by Michael Wolgemut

The Ball-&-Socket Ball

It was late o’clock in late October, I recall,
As I buttoned up my coat and set off home –
My hours in the library had still left no trace,
The depths of my mind were whipped to foam.
So, keen to sooner reach out to my waiting bed,
I took a shortcut past the ancient church –
And in my barely-woken walk I stumbled through the graves,
As I fancied how their folks might up-and-lurch.

But I never thought they would…
But I never thought they’d push the slabs aside…
And yet, here were their skeletons
Just walking round as if they’d never died !
Good thing I was overtired,
Or else I’d surely have to scream and hide…

Paralysed by shivering and weariness,
For the sight of all those bones had rattled me –
But most because I’d spent all week to memorise
On the finer points of man’s anatomy.
And as I looked in horrified astonishment,
A prayer had made its way onto my lips:
“The head bone is connected to the vertebrae,
And the metacarpals to the fingertips.”

But I never thought they could…
Yet I never had the chance before to watch the dead.
And yes, the hour was very late,
But then, well, so were they !  Yet there they tread –
And right there in the flesh…
Or, excuse me, out the flesh, I should have said.

I saw upon those skeletons the marks of busy lives,
Like bones that once had broken and re-set –
I saw some more with fractures, some with cancers, some with spurs,
In a lesson I could never now forget !
Their joints had lost their cartilage, yet showed no trace of arthritis,
Where bones were grinding naked onto bones,
And osteoporosis having tapered some so thin,
Yet so carelessly they danced around the stones.

And I’ve never understood…
But I suddenly remembered ev’ry word I’d read –
These visions were impossible,
Because of ev’ry fact that popped-up in my head
And I was overcome,
And I dropped down in exhaustion on my grassy bed.

And when I woke up, slowly woke up, propped against a gravestone,
Quite alone in my new neighbourhood –
Well, I dusted off the dew and I made my way to class,
To a test I had to pass – and knew I would.
Now I cannot expect you to believe a single word of it,
Yet deep down in my marrow, there’s a shred…
Though I looked around the churchyard on that morning as I left
And saw ev’rything was still and very dead.

But I never said you should…
Don’t believe my ev’ry no-word-of-a-lie –
And as a trainee-medic,
I will always trust in science till I die.
But whatever did occur that night,
I’ll always know one thing – dem bones ain’t dry !

I am a little bit embarrassed to admit that ‘arthritis’ above needs to be stressed on the first syllable instead of the second to fit the rhythm, but I can’t be that embarrassed since I haven’t removed it.

Unnatural Selection

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pumpkin patch

Unnatural Selection

Pumpkin, oh plumpling, oh hideous mutant !
The hothouse of Hades is where you were born !
Nobody thinks of your yellow-starred flowers,
They only remember your potbellied spawn.

An fragile annual, a delicate diva,
Confined to the plots of the greenhouse and garden.
You won’t survive long in the wastelands and margins,
Where squirrels will eat you before you can harden.

Sclerosified skin in an orange-palled jaundice,
With five-fingered leaves and with deep, sucking roots,
And a hunger voracious to fatten grotesquely
Your thickly-pus’d tumours, your Frankenstein fruits.

So pump up the pumpkins, fatter and fatter,
You’re nothing but water and tasteless matter –
Your heads then trepanned to scoop out your cortex,
Yet still you’re invading our legends and doorsteps.

Yet many won’t make it – mistakes of blind nature,
All twisted or stunted, or rotting while still on the vine.
And if they’re not ripe by the first frost, they’re lost.
Oh Lord, what have we created ?  Oh monstrous design !

Fear & Statistics

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cobbles

Fear & Statistics

Have you heard how crime is falling,
Muggings at an all-time low ?
Murders, rapes, are miniscule
Compared with fifty years ago.
So when you’re walking back tonight,
The odds are very much in favour
Of you getting home alright.

So when the shadows rustle
And your heartbeats dance a jitterbug,
You’re almost surely not about
To face a psycho or a thug.
The cold wind sighs, the lone fox yelps,
But rest assured you’re probably okay –
I hope that helps.

Night Atmos

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gothic
Path to the Gothic Choir by Raphael Lacoste

Night Atmos

That moment on a sleepless night
Whose darkness isn’t quite as pitch as tar,
All thanks to the full moon’s eerie light
That serves to point out where the shadows are –

That moment when its gloomy shaft
Is broken up by something on the wing,
And underscored by the whistling draught,
As the floorboards knock and the radiators sing –

That moment when a rustle sighs,
And somewhere else a big clock ticks too slow,
And the nearby buzz of courting flies,
And the distant screech of an owl, or maybe a crow –

That moment when we feel a chill,
And sense an electric tension in the air,
And it always takes an act of will
To tell ourselves there’s nothing really there –