Trudi still felt no desire to undo Murray’s final fate by travelling back further than the night she had eaten him. However, there was a new yearning which had forced her to reconsider her refusal to travel back further than that period.

Trudi had recently been in the audience of a poetry slam that was on once a month in the village hall. She was 39, currently not on call for any acting roles, and had taken another holiday to her home country. Having seen the poetry slam advertised, she was interested, as there was a scarcity of interest in poetry in modern times. People were more interested in videos, internet chat rooms, and various other more immediate distractions than the possibility of having one’s mind transformed by the more classic art of the spoken verse. She sat in the audience at the back row of seats, aware that her fame had largely receded in the fifteen years since the final season of ‘Mountains Family’ had gone to air, but not willing to seek too much attention.

Many of the poets wrote short lines, often badly scanning with no regular rhythm and some couplets with flawed attempts at rhyming. In addition to those disappointing aspects, they didn’t really have much of a message to deliver either. Trudi was close to writing the event off as a bad bet and walking out the back door of the community hall, when onto the stage walked someone who immediately caught her attention. He stood out from everyone else in the room, because he was wearing a fancy striped double breasted jacket, a turtle neck sweater, and a neat pair of trousers. The outfit reminded her strongly of the clothing worn by the more dapper fictional television characters, when she had been a teenager. He looked around 29, which would have made his birth year the same as Murray’s, she mused, wondering how Murray would have felt to know that she was free to enjoy another younger man’s poetry long after sending Murray down to his delectable destiny. If that was the case, then the young poet would have been in kindergarten, while 15 or 16 year old Trudi had been forming crushes on dapper television actors. If this young poet had even started watching television back then, he wouldn’t have been watching adult adventure shows. Trudi surmised that he had probably watched the reruns many years later, and taken his fashion cues from those hours of viewing pleasure. She glanced around the room again at all the dull, ininspiring black hooded parkas and jeans and made the decision to hear this new poet’s performance, rather than walking out.

Hopefully she wouldn’t suffer any more add verse effects.

“Good evening. I’m Daniel Blackridge,” said the latest poet, “I’ve been writing poetry since I was eighteen years old, and desktop self published a selection of my personal favourites in a book. Since people are generally doing two poems each, I’ve chosen a couple that are about looking back at life. Although the first one, being a little bit cynical, also speculates about stages in life that I haven’t reached yet. It’s titled....