Wubble Trouble: Dream the First
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,
And each damp thing that creeps and crawls
Went wubble wubble on the walls,
Faint odours of departed cheese
Blown on the dank unwholesome breeze
Awoke the never-ending sneeze.
Footnote:
Lest I his copyright imperil:
I bagged those lines from Lewis Carroll.
All this, alas, was but a dream ;
Such things are never what they seem,
And I awoke, not with a scream,
Nor coloured ‘round with marble tones,
But with a sense of aching bones,
Inside a shed of nubbled stones
Collected from surrounding fields,
Where even yet such bounty yields,
That he who lusty trowel wields
With mortar quite too thick to pour
Could clad a city from its store,
With fifty thousand homes or more;
Of wubbling creatures not a scat,
But spiders, flies and things like that,
And now and then a flitting bat.
And so my dream of marble frieze
Fell off, replaced with such as these—
Unlike, I weep to say, the sneeze,
Which first in tickle did reveal,
Then blasted forth a trumpet peel
To prove itself entirely real.
Dream the Second
I dreamt I sailed on ghostly seas,
Without the slightest passing breeze
To help recall the Hebrides;
A thousand thousand slimy things
With all the smells such escort brings
Went wubble wubble with their wings—
Yes, with their wings, I do recall,
And foetid fog cast ghostly pall
Upon the streets of Montreal,
Though why I should be there, I guessed,
Was part and parcel with the rest—
So, this hypothesis to test,
I struggled gamely up the mount,
Among more squirrels than I can count,
And spying a slug-horn by a fount,
I blew a huge stentorian blast,
That in rebounding echoes passed
And left the populace aghast.
But dreams, from the subconscious mind,
Are not the same as what we find
From day to day among our kind—
Awaking from these to’s and fro’s,
I found myself once more in throes
Of agitation through my nose:
Alas! my dream of wubbled seas,
And cities slug-horned to their knees,
Was just one more on-rushing sneeze.
Dream the Third
I dreamt I walked ‘round Georgian Bay
And earned my keep by loading hay
On wagons for three meals a day,
A place to sleep, and pocket change.
Each night a host of beings strange
Went wubble wubble on the range,
And kept me from my sleep, I found,
Which to forestall I turned around,
And groped my way to Owen Sound,
Whereat, among the sweating herds
Of poets whose untuneful words
Drown out the notes of singing birds :
Once more the slug-horn I extend
Once more the embouchure unbend,
And clear the street from end to . . .
The End