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Not to forget it is a Duke I am.
‘If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it…’ Oh, damn and damn!
How do I rescue this disastrous start?
Theseus, not Orsino, is my part.
Paul Griffin
My first kiss came from Mimsy Borogoves
In the fifteenth year of my sebaceous youth.
Dear girl! Her breath was redolent of the cloves
She sucked to palliate an aching tooth.
Undone by mouth so spiced, I grieved the day
Mimsy and family, from the house next door,
Moved to a town two hundred miles away…
Enriched by fifty years, we met once more
Recently at a Spouseless Oldies dance.
Nervously whirling Mimsy in a waltz,
I made her laugh, and from a close-up glance
Gleaned that her teeth, though pearly white, are false —
Hence cloveless. But my heart was warmed by seeing
That now her spice breathes in her very being.
Ray Kelley
My heart aches, for I’ve taken so much wine
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet.
Death now seems easeful — give me some retreat,
Some magic garden where I may recline
Under an incense bough where eglantine,
Musk-rose and violets bloom in summer heat.
My Bacchus thoughts are fabricating sweet
Enchantments round one satisfying line.
Real and unreal no matter when
Nightingales sing to me of summer bliss
In nearby fields. Their rapture overhead
Gives inspiration to my waiting pen.
How pleasing to compose a line like this:
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
Frank Mc Donald
My wife wants to take a vacation
If sunshine’s not moonshine this year:
Dear God, all that hard preparation —
Suitcases, flight times, the fear
Underpinning the horrid palaver —
Mooching moodily down where the sands are,
Meeting crashers and drinking cheap cava.
Extravaga-bloody-bonanza.
Really, I’d rather be working,
Nodding happily over some numbers
In an office, or quietly lurking,
Getting lost in the sweetest of slumbers.
Holiday fun is the worst kind of hell:
The pit is the pool of a five-star hotel.
Bill Greenwell
Must fix those curtains: that confounded chink
Invades the darkness and frustrates my dreams,
Drilling each eyeball with its searchlight beams.
So much for bedtime mugs of milky drink
Urged as the most effective way to sink
My troubled spirit in Lethean streams.
Macbeth was not the only one, it seems,
Endlessly doomed no more to sleep a wink.
Read something? Fatal — that induces thought.
Narcotic drugs? (My pillow needs reversing.)
Is that our neighbour’s dog, the brute that yaps?
Get up and eat? Take exercise? That ought…
Half dozed off then! A bath, now? Yes, immersing
Tepidly, deeply …or again perhaps …
Godfrey Bullard
Midsummer night! Midsomer Worthy! Murder!
Inspector Barnaby is on the case.
Devona must have screamed. Had no one heard her —
Spotted something odd around the place?
‘Useless asking me,’ says Gertrude Grundy,
‘Me too,’ adds the Major with a sigh,
‘Miss Gertrude spent the night with me on Monday,
Everyone will back our alibi.’
Ruthlessly the sleuth continues prying,
Never is the shrewd inspector wrong.
In the end he proves the pair are lying,
Gertrude has been guilty all along.
Her sentence, life, shows justice can be done;
Two years she’ll serve or, with parole, just one.
Alan Millard
No. 2453: Fill the frame
You are invited to supply a story beginning, ‘We took our seats at the table. There were seven of us’ and ending, ‘And then we asked Angela to explain about the pyjamas.’ Maximum 150 words, including the given ones. Entries to ‘Competition No. 2453’ by 20 July.
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