A REALLY AWFUL BLAST OF NOTHING MUCH

The SidevieW theme this week is such:
We are to write on nothing much;
Though ‘nothing’ is fine
I do draw the line
At trying on the ‘much’ to touch. 

‘What are you doing?’ ask a lad,
‘Oh, nothing!’ isn’t all that bad,
But ‘much’ added there,
You’d better beware –
There’s something done to drive you mad! 

With friends (two brothers) once at night
We went and swiped some dynamite
All ready, in fact,
With fuses intact;
(I know, now, that it wasn’t right!) 

And now that we had got the means,
We blew a bridge to smithereens,
(It wasn’t in use,
So curb your abuse –
And, after all, we were pre-teens!) 

When asked what we had done that day,
You know exactly what we’d say!
The ‘nothing much’ line
Was working just fine,
And it gave nothing much away. 

Then New Year’s Eve we thought that we
Would see it in explosively,
And from the friends’ house
Crept out, each a mouse,
To barren hillside we could see. 

We stuck the detonator in,
And fuse, before we could begin
Right under a rock,
With stones in to block,
So it would make the greatest din. 

A fifteen-minute fuse the one
We lit at quarter-to; a run
To back through the door
Ten minutes before
There would begin the New Year fun. 

That fuse was really most exact,
At stroke of midnight – that’s a fact –
A mighty blast blew,
Which gave one a clue
The rock had ceased to be intact. 

Friends’ father looked at us and said,
Not, ‘What was that?’ but with some dread,   
‘How did you do it?’
We knew we’d rue it
If told him, so looked blank instead. 

When my own parents asked next day
My doings while I’d been away,
A ‘Nothing much!’ there
Was all I’d declare,
Or there’d have been the hell to pay! 

© Colonialist July 2013 (WordPress)