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This week for the W3 Poetry Prompt #177 the Poet-of-the-Week Jaideep Khanduja invites us to write a poem where form and content are at odds.

Read the full prompt guidelines here

Jaideep’s prompt guidelines

This week, we’re playing with contrast:

Write a poem where form and content are at odds.

• Use a light or playful form (for example, a limerick, clerihew, double dactyl, skeltonic, or nursery-rhyme rhythm).
  • Or simply write in any style that sounds upbeat through its meter, rhyme, sing-song cadence, or playful repetition.
• Then employ that cheerful sound to convey weighty subject matter — loss, mortality, injustice, or other serious themes.

The tension between the bright form and dark content should create an unsettling or thought-provoking effect.

Extra twist (optional): Work the word echo into your poem.

I wrote a limerick in response to this prompt. I love limericks because they’re funny.

This time, however, the Poet-of-the-Week challenged us to be at odds with the form’s usual light-heartedness.

I wanted to create a song longer than the limerick’s five lines. So I wrote two verses in limerick form, then broke the rules with a third stanza—a quatrain.

Composing the song was fascinating, especially in an upbeat tempo—but I ultimately decided against it and added a touch of melancholy to the final mix. (Music audio below the extended poem.) Sorry, Jaideep, for bending the rules! Please feel free to read the text in an upbeat tone, though.

I mixed an upbeat version in line with the prompt’s brief of contrast, and the more melancholic version—expanded to two limerick verses and a quatrain—just to please myself. I hope you enjoy both versions!

Exhibit A

A dark limerick (& songs) by Lesley Scoble

1. Music Audio – Exhibit A

An upbeat dark Limerick

2. Music Audio – Exhibit A

A melancholic twist on the limerick form—in a song

There was an old man from Peru,
who looked like the back end of a gnu,
he suffered cruel jeers,
then numerous cheers—
when they locked him away in a zoo.

Exhibit A, sad, inside his cage,
crowds paying to see him on the stage,
tickets to the theatre,
to mock this poor creature,
applauding at his disadvantage.

No curtain call—just cold steel bars;
no real actors or Hollywood film stars:
only echoes of a man no one knew,
who had the appearance of the back end of a gnu.



—Lesley Scoble, September 2025

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NOTES

And a little bit of personal history…

In the Victorian era, there was a strong public appetite for so-called “freak shows.” Travelling circuses became popular venues where audiences paid to gawk at those considered “unusual”—often people living with disabilities or visible differences. A bearded lady, for instance, could easily draw a crowd.

Exhibit A began as a dark limerick, but it soon stirred an old memory. Years ago, I appeared alongside my sister as the Siamese twins in David Lynch’s The Elephant Man.

The Elephant Man (1980) Circus Scene
The haunting, and surreal, circus scene revealed how suffering becomes spectacle—how applause can taunt. That same unsettling current resurfaces here, in my poem with the man mocked and caged. I wrote it without consciously realising it was an echo of Merrick’s fate in the travelling circus.

John Hurt’s make-up for Merrick in this scene took four hours to apply. Four hours of sitting in the make-up chair in the early hours before dawn.

The Giant in the circus scene was played by Chris Greener, a charming man who popped by to chat with us in our dressing room. He couldn’t fit inside, so he stayed in the corridor, talking through the skylight above the door.

You can spot the actor Marcus Powell who played Midget, at the bottom right of the still.

Siamese Twins
We were filming into the night. It had been a long day. I’d been physically attached to my sister for hours! I love her dearly—and don’t get me wrong—but by then, I was heartily sick of her extremely close company.

The studio had broken momentarily. Our Siamese Twins costumes were joined at the hip (literally!) by a four-foot-long strip of strong Velcro. Have you ever heard a four-foot strip of Velcro ripping apart with a desperate tug to the right? The sound is loud. Much louder than I anticipated. All heads in the studio turned. We had everyone’s attention. I suspect Mr. Hurt even raised his head from his Patience card game.

Teresa and I sauntered off toward the cage of baboons.

Baboons
I was fascinated by the baboons. We both looked up at them through the bars. My sister pointed at a big male in the top corner of the cage.

“Ooh,” she said, “Look at how bright their bottoms are.”

The male baboon immediately turned, pointed and aimed, and with a full frontal attack squirted a jet of urine directly into her eye.

What a shot! (I never knew baboons did that‽) She covered her eye with one hand and called out, “Make-up! Make-up!”

Haha! Only my sister would worry about an incident like that ruining her make-up.

A Thoughtful Pause
On a serious note: what we were doing came from curiosity—but were we guilty of gawping at the baboon, just like those Victorians who paid to see caged “oddities” and stared without empathy?

Did the baboon feel threatened by my sister’s gaze?

It was hilarious in the moment—but looking back, I wonder if the baboon saw us as intruders, not admirers.

On set with David Lynch

David Lynch is seen directing us in this still. I’m obscured in the shot, but he’s looking straight at me. I treasure my personal memories of meeting this extraordinary and charismatic director.

The actor Kenny Baker—who played the Plumed Dwarf (and famously portrayed R2-D2 in Star Wars)—stands by the baboon cage.
We met again by chance in a beach bar in Mallorca. I happened to sit down on a stool right beside him! It turned into a lovely reunion, with a couple of G&Ts and plenty of laughs.

Circus Scene Cast List

🎪 Circus Scene Cast Highlights

• John Hurt – John Merrick (The Elephant Man)

• Freddie Jones – Bytes (the brutish showman)

• Kenny Baker – Plumed Dwarf

• Chris Greener – Giant

• Lesley Scoble – Siamese Twin (credited as Lisa Scoble)

• Teri Scoble – Siamese Twin

• Claire Davenport – Fat Lady

• Orla Pederson – Skeleton Man

• Marcus Powell – Midget

• Gilda Cohen – Midget

• Patsy Smart – Distraught Woman

• Phoebe Nicholls – Merrick’s Mother (in flashback)

• Pat Gorman – Fairground Bobby

• Stromboli Fire Eater – Uncredited sideshow performer

• Eiji Kusuhara – Japanese Bleeder

• Robert Day – Little Jim
*_{In the film’s cast list, our first names are Lisa and Teri. At the time, on a whim, I changed mine to Lisa (don’t ask why), and my sister Teresa changed hers to Teri—she still uses that stage name/nickname.}

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THANK YOU
Thank you, Jaideep, for your prompt that sparked this poem.
Thank you, David, The Skeptics Kaddish, for your inspiration and encouragement.

Last but not least, thank you, the reader, for your time reading and listening to my poem.