This is song is complete nonsense and I wrote it in October 1988. It describes a man who wore a plastic rose, its stem sticking up his nose. He also wears a funny hat made out of an old tin can. In one verse he travels on a double decker bus. In the end, he dies while trying to blow his nose and falls into a hearse. In case you harbour any notion that there may be some merit in the lyric, I shall present you with Verse 3 by way of illustration and that should sort that out:
He wore a funny hat
It was an old tin can
A most peculiar man
In love with his pet rat
And every time the rat ran up his nose
It chewed the petals off his plastic rose
He wore a funny hat
He loved his litte rat
And a troupe of termites lived between his toes
I keep thinking that I ought to be properly self-critical about this song, yet I quite enjoy singing it. One of the few positive things I can say about it is that it has quite an unusual rhyme scheme. The nine line stanza takes the following rhyme form:
abbaccaac
And the first and fourth lines return in the seventh and eighth.
I'd like to know if this follows a conventional poetic rule, so if anybody knows please email me. Years ago someone who worked at Sunderland university used to help me with technical queries on poetry. He was John Coggrave. I remember he once very kindly lent me a huge book on this sort of thing. I think it was 'The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Verse' or some such title. To browse through such a tome could only be surpassed, in terms of enjoyment, by a perusal of the Hilman Avenger car maintenance manual :-)
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