Two Dead Boys Walking ...

A "newbie" commenter to Desi's Place has got the shortest Blogname I've sighted so far. The engineered Y! link leads to y1.blogspot.com, and funnily an Oxymoronic Poem pops up to light up my face thus:)!

In a short intro, Y! says the author was unknown, and on my first visit, I commented that I ENJOYED the poem tremendously, adding that I wouldn't mind claiming ownership if no one else does. But a second visit leads to a letdown note that somebusybody has refered him to a site called Bititish Columbia Folklore Scoiety website which gives a long history of the poem's origins, which has many VARIATIONS. The one featured here is "borrowed" without perceived permission from y! Don't ask me why ... in the spirit of Laughter and Light-lah, can or canNOT?

(Thursday, July 21, 2005)

An Oxymoronic Poem


one bright day in the middle of the night

two dead boys got up to fight

back to back they faced each other

drew their swords and shot each other

a deaf policeman heard the noise

and came to rescue two dead boys

if you don't believe this lie is true

ask the blind man, he saw it too


From the website y1 referred me to, the following is extracted:

Although the Two Dead Boys poem (also titled in folklore as “One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night”) is often referred to as a nonsense rhyme, the description is not strictly accurate. It is clearly understandable in any of its many forms and versions and the impossibilities in the story are no more than sensible words and phrases that have been transposed.

As to the history of “One Fine Day…” it appears to have evolved from tangle-worded couplets that have been popular in Miracle Plays and the folklore and folksongs of the British Isles since the Middle Ages. Tiddy, in his book The Mummers’ Play [1923, Oxford, Oxford University Press], cites the earliest known example of this type of humour as appearing in the manuscript of Land of Cockaigne about 1305 [Tiddy 1923, p. 116] and a 15th century manuscript in the Bodleian Library [MS Engl. poet. e. 1: c.1480] includes four lines that are directly related to our rhyme. These can be translated into modern English as:

I saw three headless [men] playing at a ball,
A handless man served them all.
While three mouthless men laughed,
Three legless [men] from them ran.

In a similar form the lines remained in Scottish tradition to the mid 19th century in the Lying Song [Shoolbraid, Bairnsangs, unpublished manuscript, 2004].
The 16th century English folksong Martin Said to his Man is a drunken exchange of impossibilities between a master and his servant, each of whom is attempting to outdo the other. The song includes such lines as:

"I saw a mouse chase a cat, saw the cheese eat a rat"
and
"I saw a maid milk a bull, every pull a bucket full"

Many slight variants of the first line exist. Among the pore popular are:

"One day..."
"One bright day..."
"One bright morning..."
"Early in the morning, late at night"
"Early one morning, late at night"
"Late last night in the middle of the morning"

also

"'Twas on a dark and moonlit night"

and

"One dark night in the middle of the day,
Two dead boys got up to play."


In a recent discussion with mGf Mr Coww, who is equally at ease with Shakespeare as with Chinese scholar called Lu Xun, said Desiderata should aspire towards the highly regarded Chinaman’s status, maybe producing works to rival “The stories of Ah Q”. The wisecrack in me swiftly thought aloud that I desire to produce “The Legend of Ah P”©; maybe I can get an advance of a Cultural Grant from the DewanBahasa&Polisie – you know, recogniton of China’s growing status, these guys are already spending a BIG budget for a year-long China-Malaysia cultural festival currently going on with the emphasis on Malacca’s glory days when a certain Malaccan Raja married a Chinese Princess named Hang Li Po; so it’s not impossible they might just be generous to extend some dough to a struggling scribe.

Maybe, to be safe, I should change my nick to HangTuaLong? Anything for some fun(D) to launch my writ(H)ing career, right? Yes, another rhetorical question, just in case the DBP responds.

So I, expired by THE TWO DEAD BOYS, had prepared this Surat Bersunat to be sent off to the DBP by Instant Mail, using a fe-mail courier, no, not a pigeon, Brudder Imran, that's only used in Peking, not Malacca!

With this sample of my work, verified by Mr Coww as original&unpublished todate, and confirmed by a JP-Commissioner of Oafs:

Why the Ah P Legend Should Be Sponsored

I am without two hands, but I can write
When I can’t write, I can cut and paste
The material on the Net has no ©right, only what’s left
So I make my fortune writ(H)ing the Legend of Ah P’s 'Rite
Since P precedes Q, ah! I can claim Lu Xun’s works as Ah P’s
Change Peking duck’s to Melaka chicken-wings
One minus wings flies, the other minus webfeet swims

One A(h)P fetches RM30,000
I ask for RM60,000 for each legend
You at DBP can keep RM30,000 for kopi-oh
My A(h) P still gets his RM30,000, arse-ho

© July 26, 2005
Witnessed by Mr Coww, with 2 Meows.