Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?
 Do you wake, Mrs Thatcher, in your sleep?
 Do you weep like a sad willow?
 On your Marks and Spencer's pillow?
 Are your tears molten steel?
 Do you weep?
 Do you wake with 'Three million' on your brain?
 Are you sorry that they'll never work again?
 When you're dressing in your blue, do you see the waiting queue?
 Do you weep, Mrs Thatcher, do you weep?

Notes: In the voice of Adrian Mole, from “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole,

Aged 13 3/4” (or, possibly, “Growing Pains” - I don’t have my copy handy)

“Unemployment soon passed three million, a figure unthinkable just a few years beforehand. This economic crisis sparked deep rivalry in the cabinet and triggered a number of high profile resignations.”

– http://www.margaretthatcher.net/biography/

Writing bad fictional poets is a delicate and seldom-mastered art. It is not enough to write bad poetry - the poetry has to be convincingly bad, and bad in such a way as to let the reader sympathise with the “poet” who doubtless thought it one of his masterpieces. (Quoth the young master Mole, “I think my poem is extremely brilliant. It is the sort of poem that could bring the government to its knees.”)

Above all, one should never get the impression that the author is self-consciously writing a bad poem. Douglas Adams fell into this trap, for instance, with his Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings poem about the dead swans, which definitely detracted from it. Luckily, Townsend makes no such mistake; her Adrian Mole poems are uniformly brilliant, the kind of bad poetry that gets written by your angsty high school classmate, except that they somehow manage to be hilariously funny as well. (“Mrs. Thatcher” is actually a pretty good poem compared to the rest of the collection - indeed, the reason I chose to run it rather than some of the more egregiously bad poems is that I find it surprisingly memorable and fun to recite to myself.)

— Martin

Links

More about the Adrian Mole books

http://www.adrianmole.com

(and if you haven’t read them, I strongly urge you to - the first few, in particular, are altogether brilliant). There’s a great review here:

http://www.epinions.com/content_Biography of Townsend:

http://www.adrianmole.com/Sue/biography.html