Here is your hamper…
…have a lovely time
Sometimes, you’ve just got to let it all out. But, so a long-standing motto of mine goes: Make Your Pain Entertaining.
It’s not been a great day, so when the prompt of a Ballad came through, I wrote the following ‘picnic ballad’. Don’t worry, it won’t be anything as chintzy as you first imagine.
The idea came from working with a student today, on Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade‘, which features the lines ‘All in the valley of Death/ Rode the six hundred’.
And the student asked, ‘Why have I written there’s no hope of them coming back as a note underneath it?’
To which I responded, ‘Well, if I said I was going for a picnic in the Forest of Despair, would you think it was going to be a nice picnic?’
And so when I got in, I wrote this, about that very forest. It just sort of…popped out.
Probably best to read it either if you’ve had a really good day, or a really bad one.
I might get it set to music.
Picnic Ballad
or, As I Wrote This My Pencil Snapped and As I Typed It Up My Computer Shut Down
[CHORUS]
The city’s full of scorpions,
There’s locusts in the air:
We’re going for a picnic in
The Forest of Despair.
The wrought-iron gothic entrance gates
Say we should turn around;
But we have flesh and knives and plates
And Gingham for the ground.
[CHORUS]
Among the leaves, the birds do sing
Ballads of woe and fear;
But we shall thwart their whispering
With bread stuffed in our ears.
[CHORUS]
The squirrels bury in the ground
All hopes of picnics past
And six feet down, they can’t be found –
The tree-rats dig too fast.
[CHORUS]
Up in the balmy, cloudless sky
The Sun’s great furnace fumes.
His black baseball-cap upon high
Which reads: “I OWN YOUR DOOMS”.
[CHORUS]
We’ll leave there with our bellies full
Of Emptiness and Pain
And – gored by the resident bull –
Plan when we’ll come again.
[CHORUS]
Around these tangled roots of lines
The bindweed-mind writes QUIT:
Its gobby trumpets blare and whine
That life can be a chit*.
[FINAL CHORUS,
REPEAT AD INFINITUM UNTIL
YOU CAN NO LONGER BREATHE:]
The city’s full of scorpions,
There’s locusts in the air:
So join us for a picnic in
The Forest of Despair.
*Be careful not to misread this rhyme as something rude: a ‘chit’ is, in fact, ‘a signed note for money owed for food, drink, etc.’ or ‘any receipt, voucher, or similar document, especially of an informal nature’. Thus, life is merely a receipt or short note – perhaps just a poem, like this one. Cheerful, eh?
(ADDENDUM: if you enjoyed this one, then why not try my other NaPoWriMo musical efforts: A Sea Shanty for Failed Urban Development and The Pies of Awareness – which feels like a sister piece to this one. Sometimes I write happily; sometimes I write grumpily; usually I write with energy. Such is life!)
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