The candles were low, for the tallow and blubber
Had been kept burning all night
But the gloom of the room was total and rubber
Curtains kept out daylight

The air, wet and salty, fetid and dank
Was clammy and humid besides.
What passed for a room smelt fusty and rank
As if a polyp had burst in and died

From fibrous folds a ghostly wail
Emerges and rises in tone
Its source isn’t seen, but candles quail
At the noise of substance unknown

The broad wood door opens, the creature retreats
Seeming burned by illumination
The mound of material clamps tighter its pleats
Like an ill-fitted soft crustacean

In the shaft of bright sun stands a boy of but ten
If a hero, then too immature
What thimble-full Theseus enters the den,
Of this overripe minotaur.

Phlegm smacks the wall a full four meters’ hence
From orifice opened in brief
But guttural sounds and wheezing immense
Proves the action brought no relief

The mass shifts in a spasm but then so does its lair
And the door swings shut with a smack
The boy rocks in the dark and his fate is laid bare
Directionless he cannot turn back

The creature rolls, but where from and where to
Panic begins to take hold.
The boy’s balance is tested, found wanting - and ew!
He sticks his hand into a fold.

He feels soft thread and meat, but can’t dwell,
For he pictures a beast from a book,
A ferocious ‘thing’ spawned straight from hell
An amalgam of disparate desperate arts
That lumpish and spewing in turbulent swell
Would fetch from its depths flesh and ferrate parts!-
And suddenly he touches the hook:

The metal curved claw counters and slices the air,
Where his throat had been just before
It comes again fast, to take only hair
As the victim leaps for the door

Recoiling in shock the boy strikes a wall
While flailing against his aggressor
He grabs hold of a curtain, thus breaking his fall
But it slides off its rails and the creature bawls
As bright sunshine cuts the funereal pall
And the danger revealed is lesser

For its bucks leave it shucked, and shell peeled,
Its sheets lie strewn on the ground.
And in quivering light, its matter’s congealed
Prostrate and keeled
The Captain revealed,
Out of his bed on the ground

The boy exits chuckling as the captain coalesces
On his bedside sits a full tankard
Dropped into which a pill effervesces
The boy’d never seen him so wankered

From his bedside the captain grabs a second eyepatch
Ties it over his brow and pulls tight
Then claws back into bed for a well-deserved scratch
For the grog, gin and rum still has bite
His hangover proves more than a match
For the pirate’s morning after last night