TGIF

           TOADS   by Phillip Larkin

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 of 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.