"Seven bums and fourteen legs,
a brazen ecstasy which begs
the question some of us are asking -
is Peter Goulding multi-tasking?"

Martin Parker, Editor, Lighten Up Online

Monday, November 19, 2012

Lines on a Shakespearean actor with a penchant for punning trying to find Sting’s funeral

When Sting died,
The great Shakespearean actor with a penchant for punning cried
And decided that he must attend the burial,
So in order to find out the arrangements, he got onto an agency secretarial.
(This incidentally was the same Shakespearean actor with a penchant for punning that shouted out “Tubby or not tubby” every time he got on the scales,
And the very self same one that attended the Democratic convention even though he was a Republican simply to explain to everyone “I come to barrack Obama not to praise him,” which was greeted by many groans and wails.
And it may have been he who got a mouthful of cheap tea leaves while visiting his friend Percy in Indiana and complained,
“The dollar tea of Percy is not strained.”)
So, anyway, off he went with his picture sleeve cover of “Can’t stand losing you,” which he thought was an appropriate item to lay on the erstwhile pop star’s grave,
For that was the way, he thought, that a truly dedicated fan ought to behave,
And Sting, of course, was that rare exotic creature,
The singing Northumberland schoolteacher.
And when the great Shakespearean actor with a penchant for punning was a teenager back in the eighties he used to play Zenyatta Mondatta and Synchronicity in the evenings until he became sleepy,
Although he thought, and he was not the only one, that Every Breath You Take was just a little bit creepy.
(In fact, quite a lot of their hit songs, he reflected, were about suicide or paedophilia, or other such tendencies which might make listeners nervous,
Or otherwise some nonsense about hoping his legs wouldn’t break while roaming around the lunar surface.)
But to get back to the story, the funeral was in an area of the city unfamiliar to the great Shakespearean actor with a penchant for punning and he had left his sat nav behind and so could not find the correct chapel,
Where all the mourners were laying the ecological crooner to rest, among them family and fellow musicians and chief executives of big companies like EMI and Microsoft and Apple.
And the poor Shakespearean actor frantically ran around streets that all looked the same until he was quite out of breath,
At which point he sank to his knees in despair, raised his eyes heavenward and in a booming voice intoned, “Oh Sting, where is thy death?”

3 comments:

  1. Oh that is VERY bad. Very. Heh.

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  2. I always like a story built around a bad pun, the more contrived the better. Have you read Flann O'Brien's "Keats & Chapman" stories in a similar vein?

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