What happens when I'm out of muse . . .

So my pre-NaPo is going rather badly. I have excuses, but I won't bore you with them. I currently have a total of five poems out of the twelve I'm supposed to have . . . w00t!

However . . . Number Four needs some explaining, I think, lest you (all five of you) shoot me for my disgusting abuse of the English language.

Recently I've rediscovered children's verse. So, stupidly thinking they were easy to do and that all I'd need is a rhyming dictionary (which I totally blame for my rhyming-fail), I set about writing my own. It was fun until the end of the first stanza.

The idea of bears in cupboards is from a novella I'm working on alongside my novel, about a little boy called Alfred and his rather imaginative outlook on the world. It's a scene I've been thinking of for a long time, but actually got around to writing on Monday night/Tuesday lunchtime.

I'm happy with the prose, but as I was out of other ideas, I recycled the idea, added some fairies and ice-cream, and came out with this heap-of-junk poem. *sigh*

Anyway, I apologise in advance for the awful rhyming and all-round yukkiness:

#4) The Bears in the Cupboards

When I was a child, the carpet was an ocean,
deeper than the sky flipped up-side-down,
there were grizzly bears in all of the cupboards,
watching me with eyes in their hundreds,
and all the fairies who lived in the garden
would sing in the rain, and call me to their fairy-ring.

But I stood in the window, safe behind the glass,
drawing myself as I breathed close, a misted mask.
And I told them all about the great grizzly bears
who hid behind the books and dust and other such things
my father used to hide away with his old inks.
They told me, “Child, see the pouring rain
and tell me what bears love again?”

But I thought and thought, and I couldn’t think,
so I ate my tea,
counted my A-B-Cs,
said thank-you to mummy,
and then played soldiers in the nursery.

Then just before morning, while the birds still slept
and the milkman only halfway up the street,
it came to me – the solution – and up I leapt!
It’s deadly top- secret, you see,
that bears go mad for ice-cream!
Love it, they do – gobsmackingly adore it!

So with Jennie’s ice-cream, around the house I dashed,
the big ones and the small ones, each loping and lumbering
— they swum the oceans and shook out the loose threads,
then ran out into the garden and through all the flower beds,
all after me and the vanilla ice-cream.

“Come quickly!” called the fairies, glinting in the trees
as I dropped the pot of Jennie’s ice-cream in the fairies’ bright ring.
One-by-one the bears, they came, and snuffled and squeezed,
just to get a tiny lick of that delicious ice-cream.

Then the fairies worked their magic in twos and threes,
filling the air with frost and brown autumn leaves.
The bears growled and roared — a great sound it was!
then disappeared in a flurry of smoke and sparkling dust!
So now you know, when you spy those bears, hiding away
in the backs of cupboards, wardrobes or stairs, you’ll trust
that with a little ice-cream, and a fairy ring –
that beating bears is simply child’s play.