Wednesday 8 June 2016

Lull-a-by-Baby



Nursey Nursey bring me your boxy teat
For I crave a proxy milk treat
Of course my surrogate little one
And then off to sleep with you and all done

Oh no Nursey for I like to watch and see
The light come together in embrace over me
I am afeared of the solid shadows of some
Who would eclipse me, unless one be my mum

Your mamma is like you confined abed
Unlike yours we have a name for her dread
Beware no monsters coming in the night
For you arrived during the day full bright
Having eaten her out as full blight
When she popped you into the light
You swallowed the key to lock her caramel brown
Swiped the bung to tamp her blood back down

Is that why her soft pillows cannot give suck?
They smelled divine when I was first laid there
Not like the brack brew from your slack old sacs
How do you lactate when you lack for an heir?

Oh sweet child for someone so choosy
You surely fierce sup me bluesy
You really must lay back your head
I’ll lullaby you full comforted
Sing you a song to row you safely across
Morpheus’ fosse until we recover Helios

Your rhythms cert seem soothing
But your cadence I glean to be reproving
Besides I’ll do no such thing as yield
The dying of the light and my mother unhealed
It will take more reassurance
Than the filched milk of a fireside milch
Such as a nanny goat can provide
My nostrils filled with the reek of sulphide 
Your rotten eggs and brimstone sap
I yearn only to nestle in my mother’s lap

I’ll fire you a tallow to calm your forebodings
Though a flickering wick brings qualms anew
No more nocturnal comings and goings
Goodnight my sweetpea, adieu

Ha the candle affords me still sight
A shaft of flame peeling back the night
No terrors can remain concealed
I espy Nursey yonder in our field
What could she be doing the old witch?
Some midnight herbs to treat her twitch?

Good morning Nursey what a fine dawn
Your look tired, your face all drawn
What were you up to after last vespers?
Saints preserve me with continued willpower
Forever putting me through the wringer with your pesters
So I’ll tell you my little bloomer
For just why I was out under the lunar
With pruning knife I threshed fresh flowers

Are they to adorn my mother’s grave?
Why would you say that you rave? 
Let me feel your head for a fever
Can’t permit another to fall to the reaper

Then take me to drink in their pretty colours
Affirm giddily to possess fitting lustres
To lift the spirits of my ailing mother
Belladonna and poisonous milkweed I’ll wager

The only venomous thing is your lips
Clamped on my bruised and bloodied breast
Squeezing for dear life until the squeak of pips
I don’t believe you, for all the blood and the rest
I venture you infused her with tainted tincture
Under the cloak of her childbirth strictures
Just long enough for her to linger 
Before you apply the fatal cincture

Are your mammaries laced with bane?
Also to carry me off mad with pain?
So you can have my father all alone
Blind with grief stumbling into the arms of a crone
Nursey Nursey wants to play housey housey
Her plan all sown to acquire the throne
Now I know how a never gravid makes milk
My father all trussed up in your spider's silk
Strokes and dandles your udders rancid
Fomenting just like an ant palpates the aphid

4 comments:

Helen A. Howell said...

Glad I didn't have nursery rhymes like that sung to me! ^_^

Denise said...

My sympathy is entirely with the nurse by the end...

Denise said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Katherine Hajer said...

No one got left alive out of that one!

At first I thought the nurse's boxy teats was a Harlan Ellison reference, but by the end that seemed far too pedestrian. This work trips all sorts of other lights fantastic.