The Tale That Couldn'T Be Told Poem by David Lewis Paget

He’d been tapping away at the keyboard
So he could get the ending straight,
A labour of love he’d called it
But it was dark, and getting late,
The villain had to be sorted out
By the heroine, called Cath,
He wanted it all to jell before
That final paragraph.

The Moon had risen outside and shone
In a strange and subdued light,
He should have finished before, so this
Was not a welcome sight.
He backspaced over a typo, then
He looked hard up at the screen,
But all that he’d typed was gibberish,
In a font he’d never seen.

It must have jumped to another font
Was the first thing that he thought,
So he scrolled back up, to see how much
Of his work had gone for nought.
The font looked vaguely Arabian
With a hint of Russian too,
Had taken all of his storyline
So he didn’t know what to do.

He tried to highlight the paragraph
And switch to the font he’d used,
But when he read what the wording said
It had left him quite confused.
‘You’ve stumbled in to a place of sin
Have opened an ancient page,
Locked down for over a thousand years
You’ve opened the world to rage.’

‘Delete the whole of the manuscript,
Don’t let it stick in your head,
The more you read you will feel a need
And will probably end up dead.
Delete the curse, and the final verse
And destroy your hard-drive too,
Be sure, if you wish to stay alive,
To do what I tell you to! ’

He thought of the work that he’d put in
And the rebel within him stirred,
‘Why should I wear some other’s sin
When I only have your word? ’
The screen grew misty, and Cath appeared,
The heroine of his tale,
‘Take no notice of him, my dear,
I’ll die if his will prevails.’

His villain pushed her out of the way
And snarled at him through the screen,
‘Where do you think my evil comes from,
Not from some fictional scheme!
You drew me out of an ancient well
Of lies, of sin and deceit,
To clear me out of your sub-conscious
You’d better hit the delete! ’

He heard the footsteps pound up the stairs
And beat on his garret door,
‘You’d better not have my wife in there,
Or else, I’ve told you before! ’
And Cath appeared for the final time
In the tale that wasn’t complete,
His neighbour beat on the padlocked door
As he sighed, and hit the delete.

21 May 2015