Sawtooth Kid

There he was sitting on a throne, with a great ironical salutation

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

There was a kid standing in front of the sawtooth,

Who looked funny at first,

Then he sort of grimaced,

And he looked silly at last—

Then everyone stared at him.

There was a car behind him, and they sped by it:

They thought it was a school—

Then they knew it was a zoo—

And they took pictures with it:


Old people in beanies

Were sticking out their tongues,

And they thought it was a big zoo

Before anybody else did


And they snapped this kid up

And he looked like a hippo before he got

Up the tree:

And down he crawled and he crawled,

And down he crawled

And down he crawled

And up he got to the top of the tree—


where the end of the street goes.

It started on the top of the staircase

And went all the way to the balcony.

There he was sitting on a throne, with a great ironical salutation

On his head, on the one side a throne on his crown,

And on the throne he started—

He stopped suddenly.

What was he chanting?


He just heard it, and it sounded like—

It was the clang of clangs

In a thoughtless city.


Little Crab stopped and said,

“Be-careful where you eat; I’m coming to talk to you.”

But everybody else just turned and went

In quietly away.


Then he heard the clang of the throne—

It was the clang of clangs

With the ironical salutation in the end.

Ho! Ho! Ho!

Little Crab stood there,

And held the big brass key, and

And shouted—

“Long live the throne

Of liberty!”

[END TRANSMISSION]


Editor’s Notes

Excerpt from samples output around 1300 steps of a children’s picturebook model I’m training

Edits

Added horizontal rules to preserve where the generator left big gaps between sections, since the blog’s format would remove them on publish. Changed one character’s name. Changed one explicit word to a randomly generated adjective.