A young lady known as Miss Mudd
Likes to make love in the wood.
My friend vicar Lyme
Is fond of rhyme
And his shoes are covered in mud
A young lady known as Miss Mudd
Likes to make love in the wood.
My friend vicar Lyme
Is fond of rhyme
And his shoes are covered in mud
I have striven
For a benign life rhythm.
But I find
In social media’s algorithmic mind
The growing danger
Of an echo chamber
Where one’s view
Of what is true
Is echoed back
To me and you.
And the best
Is swamped by an algorithmic mess
Where truth dies
And wild conspiracies and lies thrive
Ending in hate.
He paid
For new shoes
As hers where broken.
She stayed
For a while
Causing him to smile
And then went to choose
Unbroken shoes.
But girls are not shoes.
When a young lady named Lake
Said “your poetry is very opaque!”,
I wrote one in Latin
About girls in pink satin
Who keep wicked old poets awake …!
When a young man known as Byron
Went and dated a sexy young Siren,
They found his socks
On some treacherous rocks.
But there was no sign of Byron …!
When a plucky young man known as Moore
Went and insulted my mother in law,
And my wife Mrs White
Said, “challenge him to a fight!”,
I said, “but she is a terrible bore!”
As a boy, I knew the nursery rhyme
“The cow jumped over the moon”.
Then, as a man, I learned too soon
That “the cat and the fiddle”
And the jumping bovine, are conquered by time.
Yet, like the child, I find
Rapture in rhyme.
When a young lady named Moore
Went and knocked at a midnight door,
I recall how Bishop Paul
Said, “we all sometimes fall”,
As he opened that midnight door …
The sunlight falls
On Whitehall’s walls.
Some regret the sunset.
But all fires die.
And I delight
In morning light
And Kipling who foresaw
Empire might not endure
I am conscious of the breeze
In the trees
As the vehicles pass me by.
Back at my flat
I go to my open window
And hear the eternal breeze
Passing through the trees.