But loads have taken up the challenge, and you can find them all partying hard over at Poetikat's Invisible Keepsakes, here:
http://hyggedigter.blogspot.com/
Having never frequented pubs in my life (honest: I was a clubber) I chose the one nearest to me. I have the occasional drink inside, and must confess to never missing the Quiz Night every Penpont Gala. The pub is The Volunteer Arms, and Robert Burns himself was once mugged outside it whilst in pursuit of his duties as an Excise Man. They say.
To get to my in-laws' house, I must walk past this pub. Wherein begins my tale...
The Rime of The Volunteer Arms
It was an ancient beer drinker
Who grasped my velvet sleeve,
‘By thy wild hair and shaking hand,
Back off! I beg your leave!
My in-laws’ doors are open wide
And I am close as kin,
The night is wet, the dinner’s set;
They’re pouring me a gin.’
He held me with his ink-stained hand,
‘You see this pub’, quoth he,
‘Hold off! Unhand me, four-eyed loon!
I don’t want verse, now flee!’
He held me with his glittering eye,
I felt my soul freeze still,
I listened like a three years’ child,
The poet had stole my will.
Entranced, I danced into the pub,
I could not choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man
Between his slugs of beer.
‘This pub we sit here snug within
Was once to me unknown.
Ten years ago a wild-eyed man
Dragged me in, me, all alone.
He told a tale of bloody dread
That now I’ll tell to thee;
For only if I tell the tale
Will I once more be free.
He said his arms were not his own
And made him drink all night,
Then once the pub was shut, these arms
Did make him write all night.
What’s worse, he cried, what’s worse, he wept,
They make me write in rhyme;
I can’t endure the ridicule
Of poems not truly mine.
He fixed me with a glittering eye
And begged me take his pain,
Volunteer your arms instead, he said,
That I am free again.
Fool was I then, bewitched, and drunk,
So ‘Aye’ I said to he;
He pressed his poet’s hands in mine,
The curse, it passed to me.’
‘Ten lean years, ten!’ he cried aloud
For all the pub to hear,
‘I write in rhyme each livelong night,’
He stopped to buy more beer.
I was afraid, my dinner spoiled,
My G and T diluted
And with the telling of this tale
I felt my soul polluted.
I feared, like he, those rhyming words
But dark arts grasped my arms
They held themselves out straight to he
Whose words had worked like charms.
He pressed his poet’s hands in mine
The foul curse passed to me.
‘Forward! Bridport! I come!’ he cried,
‘No longer must I rhyme, or scan, or do that metre stuff and all that shit…’
Betrayed by my own limbs, I wept,
Then walked up to the bar,
‘A beer, or two, or three,’ I said
‘I didn’t bring the car.’
I wobbled home late in the night
My in-laws’ feast forgot
Then set to write this darkling tale,
In rhyme, my sorry lot.
So if you pass said pub one night,
I beg thee, step inside.
Then volunteer your arms to me,
Restore my free verse pride!
The characters and events of this poem are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance characters in this bear to real life people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.
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