The Serial

To the Tune of Tennyson

I burst upon the reader’s eye With verbal trumpet blaring, Proclaiming me the latest cry In fictionary daring-- Vital, compelling, hectic, rare, Heart-gripping, epoch-making! A woman’s naked soul laid bare, A climax record-breaking! A quivering, pulsating plot, The mystery of a red room, A story to be read red hot In boudoir, or bedroom, An Eve, repentant, up to date, Confesses what her fall meant; You simply won’t know how to wait Until the next installment.

I come from heaven knows where--or when. My pedigree is shady. My father was a Fountain Pen; My mother, a Typelady,

Who smote the keys from morn till night With fingers swift and taper, Till I appeared, all clean and bright, On reams of foolscap paper.

And now in serial form I flow, And flout at style and diction, As like a babbling brook I go To join the Sea of Fiction.

Some streams, I know, more deeply flow, And some for speed endeavor. Short stories come, short stories go, But I’ll go on forever.

I glitter like a foolish string Of pearls, with polish painful, With epigrams of doubtful ring And platitudes Hall-Caineful.

And many a mood and tense amiss, And metaphor amuddle, And here and there a clinging kiss, And here and there a cuddle--

And here and there a phrase in French, To give a touch linguisty; And here and there a Fisher wench, And here and there a Christy.

And here and there and everywhere My thin stream slowly trickles ’Twixt Bunk’s Elixir for the Hair And Black and Croswell’s Pickles.

And here a temperamental scene, Fervid, intense, Byronic-- Tosses tempestuous between Ayre’s Soap and Tinkham’s Tonic.

A sprightly conversation’s flow Is checked by Soak and Stingham’s Pink Pills, to reappear below An ad for ladies’ thingums.

The well-known slip ’twixt cup and lip Here, too, finds confirmation-- “He raised his glass”--Thy Anti-Grip! Beware of Imitations!

--“Up to his lips; when on his wrist He felt a grip, steel-sinewed; The glass fell, and a hoarse voice hissed The words”--To be Continued.

Editorial Note

Some streams, we know, more deeply flow, And some for speed endeavor. Short stories come, short stories go, But this goes on forever.