THE HAMPSTEAD HEATH TOAD – Poetry, by Dorothy Porter

THE HAMPSTEAD HEATH TOAD

It was one of those beautiful English summer nights, when levitating on the moonshine of a moonlit world was your entranced lucky fate. The lilac shimmer of silent lakes. The whisper of ghost fox through your heartbeat. But the toad in the hand stank real. Stank through his palpitating skin. Stank of fear. Is the fabled hallucinogenic touch of toads, just as Macbeth witnessed, a hypnotising snare of toxic apparition? What thrilling doors of perception, open to the musky ooze of panting paralysed terror? Of course, on that silky intoxicating night, you wanted and will always want the toad, to calm down smell sweet, and give up his phantasmagorical secrets, generously. But the toad in the hand protected himself. The toad in the hand stank real.

(Dorothy Porter)

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