Fiction Planet

It’s a world that never fills to overflowing,
constantly stretching, endlessly growing,
while every writer throughout age and time;
in tales long and short, in prose and rhyme,
creates more protagonists to join the throng
of fictional characters, both weak and strong;
carelessly scribbled or seamlessly drawn,
old as the hills or recently born.

Fiction Planet is a crazy place
unknowingly created by the human race;
with it’s ever increasing wish for fiction,
there’s never the risk of dereliction.
All the main characters in every tale
are boxed and packed up, without fail,
in fleets of rockets, soon to be hurled
onto the surface of this far-flung world,
complete with their views, their histories and lives
the secondary characters; friends, foes and wives.
Thin personalities with watery expression,
written with no talent in a hurried session,
travel with oddballs whose unlikely obsession;
unusual habits and peculiar repression,
are fictional foibles to make them more real,
your interest to excite, your faith to seal.

Misfortune and cruelty, joy and pleasure;
every kind of fiction is here by the measure

There are ‘orrible murders by the score,
ghosts, fiends and zombies, blood, guts and gore.
Stories intermingle, tangling inextricably,
changing and distorting and whirling inexplicably.
Sex scenes steam on rain-speckled streets.
Car chase leaves tyre marks on black satin sheets.
Oldies  cry “Ahoy!” as their creaky hips
limp across storybook pirate ships.

Oily business men stroke local cheese,
cheesemakers in markets sell secretaries knees.
Spaceship doors open and wives appear,
husbands break rules that their aliens hold dear.

Alice is trapped in Arabian nights,
little boy blue gets into fisticuff fights.
Tommy Tucker is bravely climbing up the spout
when along with bo-peep he gets washed out.

Baa-baa-black sheep is pulling out its thumb
and finding a spider as big as a plum.
Flower fairies wander in the city of angels,
Jack and Jill have fallen into Aesop’s fables.

A dragon has eaten the princess with the pea,
and the mad hatter’s friends aren’t coming to tea;
they’re sitting in rows in a Dickensian school,
while Peter Rabbit teaches them the golden rule.

The whole mad planet should be overflowing
since hoards are arriving and no-one is going,
but as I said before the planet keeps growing
and there’s no indication that activity is slowing.

When the last living writer has ceased to breathe,
there’ll be no new arrivals,  and nobody will leave.
Life will be boring on that planet in the sky –
fictional folk can neither change or die.

©Jane Paterson Basil