Your turn again – to mark the publication last month of There Once Was a Man with Six Wives, my humorous and irreverent limerick history of kings and queens, I’m holding a limerick competition with copies of the book to give away, kindly donated by the publisher Pavilion.
The three best limericks will win a signed copy of the book – never mind if you’ve already bought one, it’ll make a great gift! Unfortunately copies can only be posted to the UK; limerickers elsewhere are welcome to enter if you can give me a UK address to send it to.
All you have to do is to write a limerick beginning with the line:
“A king who was bored on the throne”
There’s no compulsion to refer to historical fact or real people, unlike me you have free rein over past, present, future and fantasy. But you do need to stick to the limerick metre and AABBA rhyme scheme – so the second and last lines will rhyme with ‘throne’ and the third and fourth will rhyme with each other. A brief guide/reminder on how to write a limerick can be found here.
Entries can be submitted as a comment either under this competition post here at twitmericks.com or at facebook.com/twitmericks, of course via Twitter, notifying me @twitmericks – if you need more than 140 characters, use twitlonger, or attach a pic of your entry or something like that. Winners will be notified via whichever forum used, and I will post the winning entries here.
Closing date: 2359gmt Thursday March 23rd, 2017.
Judge: Mick Twister.
A king who was bored on the throne
Would wring for his pleasure alone
A nosy young courtier
Proposed something naughtier
And some things are best left unknown.
Hmmm… I could probably run that final line as:
“…A thing that is best left unknown”.
So:
A king who was bored on the throne
Would wring for his pleasure alone
A nosy young courtier
Proposed something naughtier
…A thing that is best left unknown.
I mean, the obvious triplet rhyme is:
“I’m thinking, My Lord, ‘Hide the bone’!”
But that’s obscene and we can’t possibly have this sort of thing in a Limerick.
Choose whatever you can get past your publisher.
Nothing wrong with a bit of obscenity – quite often the opposite in fact! But I think version two works pretty well anyway.
A King who was bored on the throne
Wished he could manufacture a clone
That would wave on cue
Ask”What Do You do?”
Controlled by an app on his phone.