'Freaky Fables' was the name of a cartoon strip by an artist called Handelsman, which appeared in the front of Punch magazine throughout the '70s (the website appears to have survived the demise of the magazine itself four years ago, but the link to the Freaky Fables cartoons is down; there is an additional site where you can apparently buy classic Punch cartoons, but it's not searchable, and I haven't been able to find any Handelsman on it) and was one of my great childhood favourites - facetious, post-modern re-workings of well-known myths, legends, and fairy stories. That's probably where my own facetious, post-modernist tendencies came from!
It is a title I find myself privately giving to a certain category of poems I've written quite a few of over the past year. The following, for example.
The River
The river and the ocean had an argument
The river would not forgive, could not forget
She decided the ocean was too salty for her
And vowed never to mix with him again
By a huge effort of will, she stopped flowing
Closed up her mouth with silt
Made a barrier between them forever
The stilled river spread into a lake
The lake became an inland sea
And, in time, she grew saltier than her brother
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