On account of backache and to fuel love’s dying embers
I bought a tempur mattress – that’s “the mattress which remembers.”
But no-one ever told me at the time I made my choice
this mattress doesn’t just have brains, it also has a voice
which seems too keen to comment and is far too much inclined
to be bitingly sarcastic and to need to speak its mind,
which it uses far too often with the total lack of tact
of a moralising zealot crossed with misanthropic tract.
It disapproves of food in bed and also what I read.
It offers snide suggestions and advice I do not need,
like hints on how the elderly can bolster their technique.
It also begs for oil-cans when the springs begin to squeak.
It stores the imprint of my shape just like the advert said
and all the shapes of all the girls who’ve ever used the bed;
and then it shows a talent far beyond the maker’s claim;
for, once it’s recognised their shapes, it greets them all by name.
The brochure said 'load-bearing,' but the wretched thing announces
every time I put on weight, even when it’s ounces.
Nor should I have to suffer all its vicious lies when said with
such sinister inflection to the women I’m in bed with.
It likes to tell new girlfriends that I’m quite a nervous lover
who’ll be done before they’ve started, then take ages to recover,
and regardless of my efforts and no matter how I strive
it marks my prowess out of ten – but seldom more than five.
It rakes up all my failures, and, what is really rotten,
remembers far too many girls I hoped I had forgotten.
And, while I’m pulling women, I really think it shouldn’t
sympathise with those I could as well as those I couldn’t
like the local Ladies Hockey Team, who kept me from my slumbers
till stretchered off before half-time defeated by sheer numbers.
But the night I hit the jackpot of delights love can afford
it gave ironic shrieks of joy and started to applaud.
I like to think that women find me suave, polite and charming,
but my mattress’s behaviour can be really quite alarming.
The memory of love’s failures should be quickly done and gone;
yet with this tempur mattress every memory lingers on.
It may be soft and comfy but I really draw the line
at a mattress with a memory that’s better, far, than mine.
So it’s time to put an end to all its snide remarks and censure –
and I’m planning to exchange it for a mattress with dementia.