They all heard the scream, ‘Someone’s murdered the butler
(or, if he’s not dead, he’s a really good actor.’)
So started my story, I just blindly wrote....
then fingers stopped moving, lump stuck in my throat
and stunned me to silence. The butler was dead;
slaughtered most foully alone in his bed.
Of such a weird crime, have ever you heard?

‘Tis the valet that’s seen as first suspect - absurd
that he be done in at the start of the show.
What now’s there to do, where can this tale go?

Suffice it to say, I gave up on a mystery;
decided to try write about olden history,
then promptly was lost on the net’s Wikipedia
searching that resource for a good encyclopaedia.

A romance that’s centred ‘round Scots’ ken of freedom...
Ah ha! I could cover the Battle of Culloden.
No, too much hard work, and I think it’s been done.
And, really, I don’t know too much about guns -
which so mocks my next notion re the Wild West.

I’m having such trouble just starting my quest.
Perhaps I should set myself something much simpler –
a comedy, maybe, about my own culture?
But, not in the mood to crack jokes, I’m afraid,
I’ve been wondering lately if I haven’t been pun-spayed.

Countless great words scrambled up in my brain,
but to piece them together, well – you don’t know the strain.
And to think of a theme that would interest another
has turned out to be a prodigious bother.
To make it much worse (if at all possible)
my damn rhyming muse is wrapped ‘round my skull.
Her thoughts - that assail me and ring warning bells
and wriggle their way round my little grey cells -
unfit to be published, it’s true, I’m afraid
and, on that small matter, I stand firm, unswayed.

My mission to write is slowly unravelling.
My mind and my rhythm is crazily travelling
a landscape of nightmare, with words all in knot,
confused, and resembling the slurred-of-speech sot