Moon Rules

If you catch anything with seven legs
only eat the red ones.

The yellow ones are tasteless and absorbent
useful for dipping in fluids to drink.

The purple ones like to be rocked to sleep
with a lullaby.

Wear your moonboots at all times.

Alcohol consumption will make your feet ache
and give the illusion of standing still.
Spinning may result in uplift if enough momentum is reached.

Don’t lick the floor, it tastes of gunpowder.

If it looks like a Satsuma, it will bite.

If a meteor comes, run around to the light side.

Don't undress where the world can see you.
The world can see you.

Only wear grey.
Dressing like the earth is right out.

Hopscotch is strictly prohibited.

A curfew operates on each third crescent moon.

Don't mention gravity.

The currency is moondust,
you can't bag it up
there is nothing to buy
and no bridge club.

Frizbees won't come back.
Ball games are forbidden (especially if you are going to ask for your ball back)

The inhabitants love The Simpsons, but don't get Wacky Races

Reconstituted food all tastes like carrot and coriander soup.

Replacing someone's moonboots
with papier-mâché replicas is funny every time.
As long as the person is not your pilot.

Sarah L. Dixon

The Knave's Grave

From early Norman days – the grave
of Jeppe Curteys

The village awards boundary burials
to its wilder sons – the cutpurse,
the heister of hoards, the breaker of styles,
the coin clipper, sheep raper, worse.
Some have bushels of stones to stay them;
the very few, like Jeppe - a grave stan.
The elders, with a guilty pride then,
keep Jeppe at the hub of three hams:
Pendleton, Sabden, and wise Wiswell
and, walking between, they'll greet
the thieving spell of Mister Jeppe -
the outsider - taken to the secret heart
of the old vibrant village web.
They have him, like their old religion,
to serve a higher purpose after death.

Philip Burton

Life Cycle

Like larvae we crept on a slipperiness of new rules in soft-soled shoes
only worn indoors: a single file of double-breasted pinafores
designed to suppress murmurs of adolescence; down pubescent corridors
of dopplered silence, names taped to our blouses like labels for life. They almost were.
Took years to unpick strict uppercase letters in litmus red; hemmed edges.
We were greedy to grow: munched cellophane flowers of yellowy green;
tasted sounds through our feet as we learned to cube roots and square a tango
for all the happenings there never were. How to perfectly crumble; succumb
when rigidly sticking to diets, dream skinny-ribbed dreams of being stickily twiglike.
We grew. Shed our skin of newness; wore gingham dresses copper sulphate blue;
impatiently awaited crystallisation. Spent lazy afternoons being anciently marinated;
entranced by romance with the Lady of Shallot; comprehended passages we had never seen
with no signs or cosines to help us. We subjugated ourselves to a passivity of verbs;
dissolved problems; measured perimeters and solutions in pipettes – such a pretty word –
that belonged in the lab but surely translated as little coquettes. How to balance grams
in brass-panned scales; weigh degrees of compliance versus self-assertion;
sew French blue seams that puckered with frustration on machines that stammered,
while from older legs, black-stockinged, saw tantalising glimpses of the laddered years.
Our hair grew too: pelmet fringes over faces curtained with deadpan straightness,
while hemlines rose like outraged eyebrows, as morals and waistbands rolled over.
We developed: became imperfect prefects; cruised through homework with pirate radio,
probed our futures with antennae long before we were ready to fly like Lucy; in the sky,
with diamonds. We applied crepuscular camouflage; Quantesque eyelids kissed with green,
mascara'd lashes spidery-black, our lips as purple as rumours of hearts; and were easily seduced
by the nectar of cheap red wine, and halves of lager with luminous lime. From silk sashes
we suspended ourselves in secret animation: disappeared in a chrysalis of mysterious absence
to universities or colleges to breed more teachers or would-be nurses. Horizons in the sixties
didn't swing to psychedelic careers.And some returned: emerged from pupal trappings
metamorphosed as mistresses, brilliantly butterflied, fluttering over a startlement of schoolgirls.

Lynne Taylor