Björn Rudberg has set this jolly Valentine’s Challenge to those idling their time at dVerse Poet’s Pub: Write a piece of prose that incorporates the given set of words and they have to come in exactly the order given, but you may break it up with punctuation. The maximum number of words is 144 (which is a gross) including the given line: It is a moon wrapped in brown paper penned by Carol Anne Duffy

So here is my dream-scape, dedicated to a self-confessed romantic who doesn’t celebrate “all this Valentine malarkey”, so I am doing “it for him ‘cos his throat is rather sore” (A A Milne, ‘Binker’ in ‘Now we are six’, Methuen, 1927

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper that today he has gifted me, as a playmate. Luna framed in a recyclable Pierrot’s ruff, concertina pleated like the smile lines around his sad happy clown’s eyes. I don’t yet know what colour are those eyes; I’ve still not had a chance to gaze (within a gasp’s compass) into them, nor — after That Breathless Once — upon his gibbous moon countenance, though we did encounter as (s)elves briefly in a magic drum journey, him grimacing beside the Fae, I so wary of my Edge. So afraid of toppling the tightrope, down tumbling off the cliff, spread-eagled, as in my mother’s dream, upon the sand below. She fears for my maidenhood; still marshals my Train of Thought, in the Sidings and Station-yards of all the Railways near to which I’ve been born, become wed, chosen my grave.