The king was in his counting house
counting all his money;
Jock and I were chained in the dungeon,
not the least bit funny.
The queen was in the parlour
eating cakes and honey;
Jock and I were on bread and water
and our sores had gone all runny.
This is what you get
for being a Celtic Communist,
lost back in the Middle Ages:
tossed into cages, burnt at stakes,
bound in chains with wife and wains,
hurled into nearby lakes.
We preached the Third Stage of Capitalism
while the world was concerned with Papal Schism,
we were a bit, perhaps, before our time
(garrotted, impaled, then buried in lime)
but people need to be told things.
Jock was a Seeker, a fiery speaker,
"Guid wha' tha haw an tschock na lings!"
he'd cry to the gathering gawking crowds
and me, I'd translate, open the roiling clouds
to expose the shining sun, I was the one
that had a way with the local lingo,
this guttural sputtering spitting speech
these brutes had cobbled together ... bingo!
and called the Ingurish tongue.
When the castle in time was attacked
Jock and I were the first among
the prisoners who escaped: the queen,
I'm happy to say, was repeatedly raped,
incessantly, in fact, to her heart's content,
and subsequently went to live in Ghent
with the gentleman-rapist best endowed.
Her husband, the king, did not fare so well:
fearful, tearful, and thoroughly cowed
he was hastened on his way to hell,
garrotted, impaled, and buried in lime,
dug up, hanged, then burnt at the stake,
as an afterthought slung into a lake.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
Jock and I married two bonny sisters,
we set up a tea shop in Ayre.
Damn the speeches, no more emotional fits,
we've become Democratic Socialists.
The girls run the shop, God bless 'em,
we smoke our pipes in the garden.
