‘I always wanted to see your face,’ she said,
She was teasing me,
I’d gone along to our twentieth wake
Since we’d been divorced, and free.
We got on better than ever we had
When chained together in time,
That piece of paper had choked us both
But being apart, sublime!

I looked across at the massive cake
They had wheeled across the floor,
‘Now that’s what I call a giant bake,’
I said. She said, ‘There’s more!’
There were twenty candles around the top
And seven around the lip,
The twenty since we had been divorced
And seven for when we flipped.

The seven year itch was what it was
When we ended up in court,
We really should have got over it
But we’d given it little thought,
For the plumber lasted a month or two
She confessed, in one of her gripes,
For she got bored with him on the floor
Checking her taps and pipes.

And I got sick of the Dolly Bird
Who had lisped, she would be mine,
Who liked to strip to the Beatles hits
When her head was full of wine,
It all fell flat when the passion died
And we stopped to get our breath,
There was nothing she had to say inside
So she bored me half to death.

We came together just once a year
As a mark of our mistake,
And every year with the slightest tear
We would share a Parting Cake.
I’d never seen one as big as this
It was white, and frilled with lace,
And that’s when Jennifer said to me,
‘I wanted to see your face!’

The lid flipped up and the stripper rose
As I dropped my jaw, and gaped,
She stood a moment and struck a pose,
‘That’s my present for you, Jake!
It’s a bit too late to apologise
For making that awful scene,
But I think we’re older now, and wise,
And you get to lick off the cream!’

The girl was covered in cream all right
On her thighs and hips and breast,
‘You get to lick what you want tonight
And I’ll scrape off the rest.’
She laughed, I laughed, and I saw her then
As the face of one I’d missed,
There was little thought of the stripper then
As we both leaned in, and kissed.

David Lewis Paget