Slinker
By P.B. Phillips

Driven Away – Halloween rhyme

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Dark and dank is where the Slinker, slank.

Under their homes, hidden, safe and rank.

 

Here he could watch, utterly un-seen

Where people were, and where they’d been.

 

The village folk, in eons gone by

Drove him away, and made him cry.

 

Slinker didn’t look, like they’d wished

His face disformed, his ears all dished.

 

Even his parents, disowned their son

Asked if they had children, they said ‘No. None’.

 

At just nine, he was turned from his home

Left in the woods, far and wide he would roam.

 

Dangers and hardship, cold and fright

He hid from bears by day, and wolves by night.

 

Scratching an existence from; wood, grass, river, and stone

He sang to the Sun, cried at the Moon, forgotten, alone.

 

He lived beyond his time, age beyond age

His heart was free, but his mind in a cage.

 

Loneliness does something, that other torments cannot

It gnaws at the soul, and love it does rot.

 

But not Slinker, he was beloved by the Gods

They grew to watch over him, and favoured his odds.

 

The sun moves ever to the right, civilizations came and went

Those who abhorred him, now dust, utterly spent.

 

Cities replaced; prairie, forest and bog

Clear water turned brown, clean air became smog.

 

His wild home utterly gone, he took to their drains

Fed by their garbage, watered by acidic rains.

 

People ever feared him, and beat him with sticks

We should look in the mirror, we idiot dicks. 

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