My pet newt, the minute Canute,
was hatched on a mossy islet
festooned with pine-cones and chrysalises
in a soggy explosion of yellow, green and violet
quenched by a frothy streamlet crashing
through the Epping Jungle,
where droplets of dew fell like tears of awe
from a woman’s eye watching a wave-punched cliff-edge crumble.
Canute and his froglet friends would frolic
among the moist rootlets that straggled
along the bank, played Bulldog and Leapfrog,
and dived into pondlets where water-boatmen paddled.
His closest chum was a freckle-faced slowworm
named Wolfgang, who wore pink socklets,
trainers with holes in the soles that drank rain
and a stinky brown jacket with gravelly fluff in both pockets.
Wolfgang’s mother owned the wasp shop
under the berrylet bush.
Her tongue flicked out a rustling language
that so confused Canute, he’d shuffle and blush.
The rustling old slowworm had little to give,
just a lunchbox wrapped in moss
with two roast wasplets in algae on sticklets.
Canute and Wolfgang munched their wasplet floss
as they slithered their way to a branchlet-strewn bump
at the bottom of Pynest Green Lane
that the local lizards called Hangman’s Hillet.
They’d heard this bump was steeped in eerie fame.
Their amphibian brainlets were not well stocked
for the shock that rocked them sideways
in the shape of a lipstick-beaked young owlet
with pigtails, cycling up the wormy highways.
Her cute magenta-varnished clawlets
were still as piles of spawn!
No pedalets spun, and yet she glided
uphill, as though the chick was magnet-drawn!
“Excuse me, Froylet!” rustled Wolfgang,
“How can you hillup drive,
when your two leglets movementless are?”
She stopped and mused, her brain a throbbing hive.
“Perhaps the North Pole pulls me up.
Or maybe it’s Pole Hillet,
the mightiest mountain in Londonshire.”
She hooted a laughlet and scratched her purple billet,
“Perhaps it’s the magnetic yank
of a ley-line or close-by meridian.
Let’s ask my Dad! The factlets he knows
probably number a hundred thousand trillion!”
They leapt on the back of her saddlet and trundled
their way to a pine-floored nest
where an owl with a pointy silver beardlet
sat reading Plato by a gin-stained desk.
Two twig-forged crutches leant on the bookcase.
He’d flap them to fly to the grocer’s
for microwaveable beetle-tartlets
and tablets for his avian myxomatosis.
Gin slurped down his bespectacled beaklet,
then he spoke with a gravelly cough.
“It’s an optical illusion, my lovelet.
A gravity road. One’s sense of perspective is off
because everything there slopes downwards,
the fieldlets and trees all around,
so Hangman’s Hillet looks like a hillet,
but actually it’s not. The road slants down!”
So Wolfgang, Canute and their hooting new friendlet,
each one a tireless beastie,
lay down and rolled up an optical illusion
all day, until their bellylets were queasy.
