Ghostly Sightings of the Pornographic Lady
In 1500, a leap year,
Two nubile sisters, each sincere,
Proposed to the very same man;
And this is when the hurt began.
1502, two years gone by:
The moon and the sun shared the sky
As Verity Limo (her surname
Pronounced exactly the same
As the stretch with tinted windows)
Married Walter Obadiah Blows,
The fourth son of a glassmith.
She had wanted to marry the fifth,
Her love for the fifth was greater.
1504, two years later,
Rose Limo married the fifth son.
Not since the hurt had begun
Had relief for the hurt so lacked.
The sisters had made a pact
On that humiliating day
Back in 1500, when they
Discovered that Royston Blows
Had been keeping secret from Rose
Verity, and vice versa.
My hand and my puter’s cursor
Are trembling now, as I type …
Verity took the glassblower’s pipe
From her husband’s kit,
And fell on it;
And without a sob,
She twirled her heart like a gob
Of molten glass.
As she lay on her back in the grass
Of Dymperk, a meadow,
An impish breeze began to blow,
And down through the blowpipe, until
Verity’s heart grew still –
An unbeating bauble.
By 1509, the warble
Of birds had yet to return
To Dymperk, where it seemed the turn
From winter to spring was redundant.
The hedgerows, ever abundant
In the promise of berries, could not
Yield them, as if the caustic plot
Where Verity Blows had died
Was stopping them being fructified.
She had died in a summer month, but when
She did it defaulted to winter, and then,
Continually, spring was hampered:
Even the breeze that had tampered
With the intubated pipe
Had gone down the summer type,
And withdrawn as winter extract.
In 1509, the secret pact
Known only to Rose was confessed;
And Dymperk, once a palimpsest
For the seasons, now static,
Was the setting for Rose’s dramatic
Confession to the widower, Walter.
She hoped, through confession, to alter
The overhanging hurt
Stemming from a year when they had to insert
An extra day;
But it altered it the wrong way –
The hurt got more severe:
The sisters had both proposed that year,
And had the fifth son, Royston Blows,
Answered them both with courteous “no’s”,
The hurt would surely hurt less;
But his answer to one had been “yes”;
An emphatic “yes!” to the sister whose name
Means “true”, though of course his game
Of hedging bets and flirting
Was over, just as the hurting
Inevitably had to begin.
The first of the ghostly sightings was in
The winter of 1608:
Think of the months you associate
With spring, with summer, with birdsong –
All of these clement months had long
Been winter in Dymperk, so while
This sighting took place in August, I’ll
Stand by the wintry season ascribed.
In 1608, a man described,
Perhaps too keenly,
How he had witnessed a lady obscenely
Hovering in mid-air:
You would expect a ghost at least to wear
Knickers – not this apparition!
She hovered in an upright position,
Her legs spread, her knees
Bent; and a gynaecologist sees
Less in a whole career
Than that man, crouching in fear,
Saw in a couple of ticks;
With the power to transfix,
Her unmentionable chasm
Was served by the stirrups of ectoplasm
That held her feet estranged,
As well as the hem of her skirt, which ranged
High above her waistline.
In the year of 1509,
Almost a hundred years before
This undeniably hardcore
Sighting, Royston Blows
Had followed an unsuspecting Rose
To Dymperk; and he hid
Within the waxy and morbid
Grass of the meadow:
Walter’s voice was low,
With sedate intonation,
But the voice behind the revelation –
Rose’s voice – came through,
And very soon Royston knew
As much as there was to know …
Just as roses that grow
Up cottage facades and along
Pergolas need a strong
Wire to train their climbs,
Our Rose, whose first name rhymes
With her husband’s last,
Had needed Verity’s steadfast
Love; and in 1509
Both the fourth and fifth in line
To their father’s transparent empire
Heard how the roses and wire
Had suffered due to the pact.
While the windows in the abstract
Stretch are opaque, they
Cannot be as dark as hearts that obey
A pact that prohibits love.
In 1500, on the hilltop above
The house of Royston Blows,
Verity had found her sister, Rose,
Sobbing, and with soft caress
She tried to make the hurt hurt less,
But the hurt was hard to ease,
And then, in response to Rose’s pleas,
Verity agreed to the terms of the pact;
And the terms were cleavers that hacked
At the wire and the roses of red:
Neither of the sisters could wed
The man they loved completely,
And they had to avoid him discreetly –
He must never guess;
And the girl to whom he said “yes”,
Whom he loved as true as her name,
Would now just have to claim
That her love for him
Had been fleeting, a whim,
Though in secret she would pine.
Forward again, to 1509:
One thousand, eight hundred and three
Days had elapsed since Verity
Died, and each new day
Had seen a grade of hurt make way
For a hurt without parallel;
And then Rose decided to tell
Walter of the pact:
Her confession blew the cataract
From the dandelion’s head -
Like evicted filaments that spread
In a breeze away from their origin
Her words found Royston, hiding within
The gloomy wicker of Dymperk’s grass;
And a grade of hurt made way for a class,
And the class made way for a grade, and that
Grade, like Little Cat Z in “The Cat
In the Hat Comes Back”, made way
For VOOM – a hurt that some people say
Will never be healed …
In the instant that VOOM was revealed
(From under the hat of Little Cat Hurt)
The brothers’ suffering, till then covert,
Contained and borne in silence,
Was evinced by weeping and violence.
Walter took flight, not wishing to show
His heartbreak to Rose … although
The woman continued to talk:
The head on the dandelion’s stalk
Was effectively bare, and yet
Rose continued, as if to let
The meadow itself learn more;
But VOOM’s momentum was such that it tore
Through five words barely voiced -
Before she could finish her sentence Royst
on Blows had got to his feet, and he
Had charged and pinned his wife to a tree.
VOOM, a hurt that is yet to abate,
Is the reason why, since 1608,
Rose has so oft been sighted,
Weebling lewdly through the blighted
Meadow, her vulva agitated,
Assailed by an insinuated
Privy part …
And VOOM was the hurt in Royston’s heart;
He tore at Rose’s kirtle and smock;
The downy seeds of the pissenlit clock
Were snatched from the air and expunged,
As Royston mauled and bit and lunged.
Rose was raped ergonomically,
Her back against a tree,
Her lumbar region supported.
So, here, from the many reported
Sightings, a composite portrait:
She hovers - no one seems to debate
This fact, though some say “floats” -
“Like an airborne sloth”, was one of the quotes;
But in almost every report
A word is used, that many are taught
By their parents never to say –
It starts with two letters on from “A”.
An occasional witness, less fixated
On Rose’s C, has related
How her throat was slit
(She died midway through her rape from it),
But no one has noticed the hurt.
And Dymperk, still inert,
Will never relinquish its season;
But Verity Blows, not VOOM, is the reason
For that …
Ha! Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat
And the Hebetudinous Meadow”!
In 1500, a leap year,
Two nubile sisters, each sincere,
Proposed to the very same man;
And this is when the hurt began.
1502, two years gone by:
The moon and the sun shared the sky
As Verity Limo (her surname
Pronounced exactly the same
As the stretch with tinted windows)
Married Walter Obadiah Blows,
The fourth son of a glassmith.
She had wanted to marry the fifth,
Her love for the fifth was greater.
1504, two years later,
Rose Limo married the fifth son.
Not since the hurt had begun
Had relief for the hurt so lacked.
The sisters had made a pact
On that humiliating day
Back in 1500, when they
Discovered that Royston Blows
Had been keeping secret from Rose
Verity, and vice versa.
My hand and my puter’s cursor
Are trembling now, as I type …
Verity took the glassblower’s pipe
From her husband’s kit,
And fell on it;
And without a sob,
She twirled her heart like a gob
Of molten glass.
As she lay on her back in the grass
Of Dymperk, a meadow,
An impish breeze began to blow,
And down through the blowpipe, until
Verity’s heart grew still –
An unbeating bauble.
By 1509, the warble
Of birds had yet to return
To Dymperk, where it seemed the turn
From winter to spring was redundant.
The hedgerows, ever abundant
In the promise of berries, could not
Yield them, as if the caustic plot
Where Verity Blows had died
Was stopping them being fructified.
She had died in a summer month, but when
She did it defaulted to winter, and then,
Continually, spring was hampered:
Even the breeze that had tampered
With the intubated pipe
Had gone down the summer type,
And withdrawn as winter extract.
In 1509, the secret pact
Known only to Rose was confessed;
And Dymperk, once a palimpsest
For the seasons, now static,
Was the setting for Rose’s dramatic
Confession to the widower, Walter.
She hoped, through confession, to alter
The overhanging hurt
Stemming from a year when they had to insert
An extra day;
But it altered it the wrong way –
The hurt got more severe:
The sisters had both proposed that year,
And had the fifth son, Royston Blows,
Answered them both with courteous “no’s”,
The hurt would surely hurt less;
But his answer to one had been “yes”;
An emphatic “yes!” to the sister whose name
Means “true”, though of course his game
Of hedging bets and flirting
Was over, just as the hurting
Inevitably had to begin.
The first of the ghostly sightings was in
The winter of 1608:
Think of the months you associate
With spring, with summer, with birdsong –
All of these clement months had long
Been winter in Dymperk, so while
This sighting took place in August, I’ll
Stand by the wintry season ascribed.
In 1608, a man described,
Perhaps too keenly,
How he had witnessed a lady obscenely
Hovering in mid-air:
You would expect a ghost at least to wear
Knickers – not this apparition!
She hovered in an upright position,
Her legs spread, her knees
Bent; and a gynaecologist sees
Less in a whole career
Than that man, crouching in fear,
Saw in a couple of ticks;
With the power to transfix,
Her unmentionable chasm
Was served by the stirrups of ectoplasm
That held her feet estranged,
As well as the hem of her skirt, which ranged
High above her waistline.
In the year of 1509,
Almost a hundred years before
This undeniably hardcore
Sighting, Royston Blows
Had followed an unsuspecting Rose
To Dymperk; and he hid
Within the waxy and morbid
Grass of the meadow:
Walter’s voice was low,
With sedate intonation,
But the voice behind the revelation –
Rose’s voice – came through,
And very soon Royston knew
As much as there was to know …
Just as roses that grow
Up cottage facades and along
Pergolas need a strong
Wire to train their climbs,
Our Rose, whose first name rhymes
With her husband’s last,
Had needed Verity’s steadfast
Love; and in 1509
Both the fourth and fifth in line
To their father’s transparent empire
Heard how the roses and wire
Had suffered due to the pact.
While the windows in the abstract
Stretch are opaque, they
Cannot be as dark as hearts that obey
A pact that prohibits love.
In 1500, on the hilltop above
The house of Royston Blows,
Verity had found her sister, Rose,
Sobbing, and with soft caress
She tried to make the hurt hurt less,
But the hurt was hard to ease,
And then, in response to Rose’s pleas,
Verity agreed to the terms of the pact;
And the terms were cleavers that hacked
At the wire and the roses of red:
Neither of the sisters could wed
The man they loved completely,
And they had to avoid him discreetly –
He must never guess;
And the girl to whom he said “yes”,
Whom he loved as true as her name,
Would now just have to claim
That her love for him
Had been fleeting, a whim,
Though in secret she would pine.
Forward again, to 1509:
One thousand, eight hundred and three
Days had elapsed since Verity
Died, and each new day
Had seen a grade of hurt make way
For a hurt without parallel;
And then Rose decided to tell
Walter of the pact:
Her confession blew the cataract
From the dandelion’s head -
Like evicted filaments that spread
In a breeze away from their origin
Her words found Royston, hiding within
The gloomy wicker of Dymperk’s grass;
And a grade of hurt made way for a class,
And the class made way for a grade, and that
Grade, like Little Cat Z in “The Cat
In the Hat Comes Back”, made way
For VOOM – a hurt that some people say
Will never be healed …
In the instant that VOOM was revealed
(From under the hat of Little Cat Hurt)
The brothers’ suffering, till then covert,
Contained and borne in silence,
Was evinced by weeping and violence.
Walter took flight, not wishing to show
His heartbreak to Rose … although
The woman continued to talk:
The head on the dandelion’s stalk
Was effectively bare, and yet
Rose continued, as if to let
The meadow itself learn more;
But VOOM’s momentum was such that it tore
Through five words barely voiced -
Before she could finish her sentence Royst
on Blows had got to his feet, and he
Had charged and pinned his wife to a tree.
VOOM, a hurt that is yet to abate,
Is the reason why, since 1608,
Rose has so oft been sighted,
Weebling lewdly through the blighted
Meadow, her vulva agitated,
Assailed by an insinuated
Privy part …
And VOOM was the hurt in Royston’s heart;
He tore at Rose’s kirtle and smock;
The downy seeds of the pissenlit clock
Were snatched from the air and expunged,
As Royston mauled and bit and lunged.
Rose was raped ergonomically,
Her back against a tree,
Her lumbar region supported.
So, here, from the many reported
Sightings, a composite portrait:
She hovers - no one seems to debate
This fact, though some say “floats” -
“Like an airborne sloth”, was one of the quotes;
But in almost every report
A word is used, that many are taught
By their parents never to say –
It starts with two letters on from “A”.
An occasional witness, less fixated
On Rose’s C, has related
How her throat was slit
(She died midway through her rape from it),
But no one has noticed the hurt.
And Dymperk, still inert,
Will never relinquish its season;
But Verity Blows, not VOOM, is the reason
For that …
Ha! Dr. Seuss’s “The Cat in the Hat
And the Hebetudinous Meadow”!
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