What Did You Do In The War, Grandad?

 A recruitment poster from 1915. It was released to encourage enlistment in World War 1. (Wikipedia)

 

What did you do in the war, grandad,
The war against Covid Nineteen?
What did you do to help, grandad,
Before they found the vaccine?

What did you do in the war, grandad,
Yes, That war of Twenty-Twenty?
The war in which so many died, grandad,
Bet you helped aplenty?

What did you do in the war, grandad,
That war against the virus?
Were you one of the brave, grandad,
Who fought so hard to save us?

Well, I stayed at home and watched, darling,
I just shut myself away,
Yes, I stayed indoors and cried, dear,
Too frightened to go out and play.

 

The Evils Of Money

 

THE EVILS OF MONEY

 

Or … as Chaucer would have said …
‘Radix malorum est cupiditas.’

Give me more –
I’ll spend it
Take it away –
I’m stressed.
Plenty by far –
I’ll lend it.
Show it off –
You’re impressed.

When lucre
becomes an obsession
Then life
Goes out of the door;
When penury
hits with depression,
I cry out –
What else is life for?

It’s not having
That is the obsession
It’s Loss that
Has brought on this fear.
What has caused my affliction,
My spirit’s constriction,
This stifling addiction,
and without contradiction,
It is knowing that now,
Somewhere and somehow,
I’ve breached my limit,
Dismantled my spirit.

For to my great cost
I have completely lost
That winning ticket.
For, Jiminy Cricket,
I know now I can’t win it.

I’ll never be sane
Not ever again
For I never will find
or retrieve peace of mind
That small slip of paper
That fortune creator
That millionaire-maker
That few extra quid
That from me was hid.
I by fate was denied
‘Agonistes’ I cried.

Oh. Let me now lie
Where the poor people lie
And let it be said,
‘He was grossly misled.’

May it say on my grave
‘He, to lucre a slave,
by its loss was enraged.
He’d rather be dead
Without his Mercedes,
Just pushing up daisies
In the gardens of Hades.’