Written by
Robert William Service |
To buy for school a copy-book
I asked my Dad for two-pence;
He gave it with a gentle look,
Although he had but few pence.
'Twas then I proved myself a crook
And came a moral cropper,
I bought a penny copy-book
And blued the other copper.
I spent it on a sausage roll
Gulped down with guilt suggestion,
To the damnation of my soul
And awful indigestion.
Poor Dad! His job was hard to hold;
His mouths to feed were many;
Were he alive a millionfold
I'd pay him for his penny.
Now nigh the grave I think with grief,
Though other sins are many,
I am a liar and a thief
'Cause once I stole a penny:
Yet be he pious as a friar
It is my firm believing,
That every man has been a liar
And most of us done thieving.
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Written by
Dylan Thomas |
Now
Say nay,
Man dry man,
Dry lover mine
The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.
Now
Say nay,
Sir no say,
Death to the yes,
the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
Should he who split his children with a cure
Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.
Now
Say nay,
No say sir
Yea the dead stir,
And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
He lying low with ruin in his ear,
The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.
Now
Say nay,
So star fall,
So the ball fail,
So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
the come-a-cropper rider of the flower.
Now
Say nay
A fig for
The seal of fire,
Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
We make me mystic as the arm of air,
The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.
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Written by
Andrew Barton Paterson |
So, the bank has bust it's boiler! And in six or seven year
It will pay me all my money back -- of course!
But the horse will perish waiting while the grass is germinating,
And I reckon I'll be something like the horse.
There's the ploughing to be finished and the ploughmen want their pay,
And I'd like to wire the fence and sink a tank;
But I own I'm fairly beat how I'm going to make ends meet
With my money in a reconstructed bank.
"It's a safe and sure investment!" But it's one I can't afford,
For I've got to meet my bills and bay the rent,
And the cash I had provided (so these meetings have decided)
Shall be collared by the bank at three per cent.
I can draw out half my money, so they tell me, from the Crown;
But -- it's just enough to drive a fellow daft --
My landlord's quite distressed, by this very bank he's pressed,
And he'll sell me up, to pay his overdraft.
There's my nearest neighbour, Johnson, owed this self-same bank a debt,
Every feather off his poor old back they pluck't,
For they set to work to shove him, and they sold his house above him,
Lord! They never gave him time to reconstruct.
And their profits from the business have been twenty-five per cent,
Which, I reckon, is a pretty tidy whack,
And I think it's only proper, now the thing has come a cropper,
That they ought to pay a little of it back.
I have read about "reserve funds", "banking freeholds", and the like,
Till I thought the bank had thousands of assets,
And it strikes me very funny that they take a fellow's money
When they haven't got enough to pay their debts.
And they say they've lent my money, and they can't get paid it back.
I know their rates per cent were tens and twelves;
And if they've made a blunder after scooping all this plunder,
Why, they ought to fork the money out themselves.
So all you bank shareholders, if you won't pay what you owe,
You will find that on your bank will fall a blight;
And the reason is because it's simply certain that deposits
Will be stopped, the bank will bust, and serve you right!
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