Life is sweet for you, Lady
You with your mandolin
Gleaming from the Maestro’s making
Your palace cool within.
The tune reflects your beauty
A pure mind avoiding sin
The clamour of Florence about you
Yet free from its mighty din.
Plucked strings so sweetly singing
The Lord then touches your chin
Jewelled sword lies on the marble
As a courtship is due to begin.
Ah, in the cool and fragrant palace Florentine
I shall be yours, my Lady, if you’ll be mine.
They couldn’t miss the delicious miss
When she fizzingly spat with a hiss
“Gerroff my case an’ leave me alone
I’ve told you before you can’t have my phone
Shove off, an’ leave me in bliss”.
“Damn’ funny chaps, these golfin’ gals”,
The aged one vaguely remembers
“They’re full of froth with squeaky pals
To trample us when they be members.
“They damn’ well crave their rights with us
By Jove, they’ll mount a frilly revolution
They’d change our laws, just monstrous
Thank God for a cast iron Constitution.
“Our comfy rules can block their pesky plans
To scrub our g ‘n’ t, our pipes an’ whisky
We’ll mount the barricades with all our fans
No gal members here, however frisky!
“The Church, the Lords, MCC an’ many other splendid chaps
Succumbed an’ took the gals at last, as so may we perhaps.”
So hugely ambitious was Claude
He felt Maude he couldn’t afford
So he spoke to her father
Provoking one stinking palaver
As he confessed he wasn’t insured.
He felt that while he was able
He should continue to visit the stable
For there he would meet
And lovingly greet
A fabulous fancy called Mabel.
There once was a girl called Consuela
Who expected to marry a sailor
But when he examined the cut of her jib
He saw she’d invented a peach of a fib
So she flounced off and married a tailor.
The moon was dramatically rising
Which in itself is rather surprising
When the deep sea diver
Soaked Lady Godiva
And copped a wicked chastising.
It’s not that he’d done anything rude
For he liked to please a good nude
But as she’d had a fine drenching
She accused him of wenching
He sobbed as she was horribly lewd.
The girl with her sweet mandolin
Faintly heard from somewhere within
When the Count soft approached her
And deftly encroached her
She made one helluva din.
‘Honey, d’ya wanna coffee?’
The sister barista shouted
‘An’ shall I add a toffee?’
As in the sun she pouted.
‘I’ll have it strong, I’ll have it now’
The sleepy beauty snorted
‘Forget the toffee, stupid cow’
Was what Facebook reported.
‘It’s comin’ up, it’s comin’ up’
Replied the qualified barista
‘Speak not like that to me, you pup
Or I’ll give you such a blister!’
Such flashy speech between these glitzy, slack-mouthed sisters
Would curdle milk and scald the mood of the gentlest of baristas.
I just missed treading on his gravestone
At least, on the corner I saw
Quite unattached the fragment’s alone
Not so far from the Cathedral door.
Clerics laid paths with these headstones
Drenched once with family tears
Now Tom’s not mourned by his loved ones
Gone themselves these two hundred years.
Whatever the whys and the wherefores
Tom’s history lies sadly shattered
His grave soul never claps in applause
Vandals triumphant when it mattered.
Silent lie the spirits of those beneath their stones content
Not they whose graves lie broken, snarling for argument.