Friday 4 May 2012

Sleep Writing

I do a lot of verbal composition in my sleep (we'd noticed - Ed.). On a bad night, this involves an endless round of rewriting and an ever more labyrinthine pursuit of an ever escaping subject - exhausting and frustrating, like far too much of my dream life. However, on rare occasions, I wake with something finished (though not necessarily making any sense). It happened today, when I awoke with this new-minted clerihew about a revered children's writer:
'Michael Morpurgo
Was born under Virgo,
Which might well explain
Why he's so very vain.'
This puts me in mind of the time Dorothy Parker awoke thinking she'd had a profound insight into the human condition and jotted down the lines, 'Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.'
My clerihew is nonsense of course - Morpurgo is not a Virgo.

3 comments:

  1. Very nice.

    My own insomniac ravings are usually nonsense words or half-words swarming around the rhythm of AA Milne's poem:

    James James
    Morrison Morrison
    Weatherby George Dupree
    Took great
    Care of his Mother,
    Though he was only three.
    James James Said to his Mother,
    "Mother," he said, said he;
    "You must never go down
    to the end of the town,
    if you don't go down with me."

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  2. Further to the above, a typical masterpiece would be:

    James James
    Wibble-you wobble-you
    Timothy George Capri
    Said goodbye to the circus
    Though he was only three.

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  3. An improvement on the original, Brit!

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