The Tale of Princess Dragonbreath

Young Princess D, a little waif,
wandered off where it's not safe.
She chased a kitten, with giggling laughter,
into a cellar where from the rafters
strings and strings of garlic hung.
She blinked at them, then tasted one.
Before you could have blinked once more
she'd eaten clove seventy-four.
Where e're she went the castle knew it
'cause she carried garlic with her--to chew it.
The smell knocked out the Queen's prize goat
and would not wash off in the moat.
The courtiers fainted, the knights were mad
and took her to the King (her dad)
with clothespins clamped about their noses.
The sentence, just as you suppose, is
Princess D must hitch a wagon
and drive to live out with the dragons.
Their breath is just as bad as hers,
or in some cases even worse.
This fate, a life of dread and horror,
had passed on garlic-eaters before her,
and was a law throughout the land
for any whose breath you couldn't stand.
But Princess D, whom I admire,
found that it was not her desire
to trundle off, like so much meat, and
find the dragons, then be eaten.
"I shall not be a meal," she reasoned,
"for dragons, though I am well-seasoned."
She ran away, and before they caught her
she'd found a stream of running water
with which she scrubbed and rinsed and wrung
the garlic smell from off her tongue.
Her sentence was commuted then,
and none were sent to the dragons again,
for the law was changed that very day.
The kingdom's favorite tale, they say,
is this of Princess Dragonbreath
who brushed her teeth and cheated death.

Metadeath

The scriptures say
Death once had a sting
Before Christ banished that pain
To mortal memory.
Exiled as it is
To short-term attacks,
Death looks with envy on what it lacks,
Ever taking away from the brave and bold,

But never gaining, only growing old

Until some day, as the poet once dared cry,

We all will shout, "Death, thou shalt die!"

On that first morning lonely Death,

In the graveyard of forgotten ills,

Will look upon his withered self,

His hands he'll madly wring,

Asking, "Oh where is my old victory?

What happened to my sting?"

And there, with nothing but a memory

Of the ones he killed

Rising from the once-mighty shroud

To the glorious, eternal, and undying now,

Death will die.