Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork 
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils 
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits;
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts - 
They don't end as paupers,

Lots of folk live up lanes 
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines -
They seem to like it

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet 
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough 
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff 
That dreams are made on

For something sufficiently toad-like 
Squats in me, too,
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney 
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money 
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other 
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either, 
When you have both.