Percy's Game by Bruce Hodder

Percy Shelley apparently once snatched a baby
from her mum's arms on Magdalen Bridge in Oxford.
He was eighteen. Soon he'd be sent down from uni.
He had written a pamphlet that the dons didn’t like.
'What will it tell us of the life before birth?'
he asked his companion, that night on the bridge.
(‘It’ was the baby.) Then he handed her back.
Some say this shows us how crazy Perce was,
the free-spirited visionary anarchist poet.
I bet the child's mother didn't see it that way.
I bet she thought 'Spare us, another spoiled rich boy,'
and had already worked out where she would kick him
with exactly the right force to double him over.
It’s likely that Shelley had a lucky escape,
leaving Oxford with both of his bollocks.

Bruce Hodder lives with Michelle in Northampton, the most statistically average town in England. He has been published in quite a few magazines over the years, most recently ‘Academy of Heart and mind’ and ‘Winedrunk Sidewalk’.