Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Depressing Lyrics: "A Pox Upon the Traitor's Brow!"

Continuing my occasional series of depressing, dark or just-plain-wrong song lyrics from Broadway musicals, here are the lyrics to a song from Drat! The Cat!, lyrics by Ira Levin. The song, "A Pox Upon the Traitor's Brow," is sung by a bunch of cops who think that one of their own turned out to be the titular cat burglar (they are of course wrong, but who cares about the plot), and the song just consists of a list of horrible calamities that they wish upon the traitor. If you need to think of a terrible thing that can happen, it's probably in here:

A pox upon the traitor's brow!
A curse upon his head!
He tricked us with his sacred vow,
Then took the jewels and fled.
He tricked us all and then he fled,
God knows where he is now.
A curse upon the traitor's head!
A pox upon his brow!

A pox upon the traitor's brow!
A pox upon his ear!
A cold that knocks on New Year's Day
And moves in for the year!
Bunions on his toes
And giant blisters on his heels!
May chronic indigestion
Make a folly of his meals!
A siezure that's related
To an apoplectic fit,
A boil or two located
So the creature cannot sit,
Charley horses, strained tendons, and ruptured ligaments,
Baseball fingers, paper cuts, and similar irksome disfigaments.

A scourge upon the traitor's neck!
A foulness on his breath!
In both his eyes a cinder speck
That stings like bitter death!
May vertigo affect him
When he's standing on the ground,
An itchiness he cannot scratch
When people are around!
May dandruff in great showers
Make the turncoat look outrave.
Cuts that bleed for hours
In the wake of ev'ry shave.
Never in all my life have I encountered such diabolical depravity!
May ev'ry one of the blackguard's teeth contain a cavity!

Misfortune take the lowly worm!
May shingles leave him weak!
May ev'ry mischief-making germ
Play house in his physique!
Hangnails on his cuticles,
A constant loss of weight,
A shelf of pharmaceuticals
Entirely out of date!
Measles, mumps, the pip, the grippe,
A classic case of mange,
A thing upon his lower lip
Completely new and strange,
This galaxy of afflictions beyond one man's endurance,
And as the final blow, no medical insurance!

A pox upon the traitor's brow!
A curse upon his head!
He tricked us with his sacred vow,
Then took the jewels and fled.
He tricked us all and then he fled,
God knows where he is now.
A curse upon the traitor's head!
A pox upon his brow!

No comments: