I have a book that I read to my daughter when I put her to bed. This is a book that is sold in every bookstore in America, and is always in the children's section. Society encourages me to read this to my daughter. It has a series of short poems and songs. The following is the content of each poem or song:
1. A nonsensical poem in which children form a circle around a rose, each with some other flowers in their pockets, followed by the mentioning of remnants of something that has been burned, followed by the children all collapsing to the ground.
2. A large egg has gained human characteristics, including a face, arms, and legs, and he is sitting on a wall. He falls off the wall and smashes the ground so hard that his entire body is ripped apart into pieces, killing him instantly. The king of the nation in which this took place sent his soldiers on horseback to attempt to resurrect the dead human egg, but to no avail.
3. An irresponsible little girl, who was charged with the duty of keeping track of her family's sheep, has lost every one of them. She has no idea where to look, so she decides the best thing to do would be to go to her house and relax because she is pretty sure they'll figure out how to get back home. And the sheep won't just come back, but when they do, they will be so happy that they will be wagging their tails.
4. A mouse found himself in the precarious position of being stuck inside a grandfather clock. He ran up near the top of the clock, but then the clock struck one o'clock, so the loud bell scared the daylights out of him and he sprinted back down to the bottom.
5. While we sing a tune about a British coin with 1/40th the value of a pound of sterling silver and a pocket full of a grain, twenty-four blackbirds somehow get put in a pie crust, then baked in an oven. This pie full of presumably dead birds is then served to the king of a nation, and upon cutting it open the birds, who just survived being baked alive, begin to sing and fly away.
6. A cat travels to London to visit the Queen and all he ends up doing is scaring a mouse under her chair. That's it. That's what he did.
7. We count to two and then buckle a shoe. Then, for no apparent reason, we count to four and shut a door. Apparently there was a draft. After that we count to six, and pick up some sticks that are lying on the floor. We count to eight and put the sticks back down on the floor but this time we lay them straight, parallel to each other. Finally, we count to ten, and say the phrase, "A big fat hen," but aren't sure why.
8. An argumentative girl named Mary is asked how her garden grows. Instead of offering the correct answer, which would be sunlight, fertile soil, and water, she says that she has hired several beautiful maids who use silver bells and cockle shells to accomplish this task.
9. Three visually impaired mice run a lot. One time, they chased after the farmer's wife, so she mutilated them by chopping off their tails with a large knife, causing them to bleed profusely, which caused them eventually to die a slow, painful death.
10. Margery Daw is on a see-saw, which has nothing to do with the fact that her friend Jack is an indentured servant who has a new boss. Since he's really lazy, he's only going to get paid a penny a day.
11. A man named Peter loved to eat pumpkins. He and his wife had some marital problems and she threatened to leave him. So he decided to kidnap her and stuff her into a pumpkin shell, which enabled him to keep her in his possession, presumably because in order to stuff her into a pumpkin shell, he would have had to brutally murder her, chop up her body, and place her body parts into the pumpkin shell.
12. Some guy asks a sheep if he has some wool. The sheep, who can talk, says that he does. In fact, he has enough for three bags. He then oversteps his bounds by telling the man how he should use each bag. One, he suggests, should be for his boss. One should be for his woman. And the other should go to the little boy who lives down the street.
13. There is an old king named Cole who was very happy because he has an arrangement in which someone brings him a bowl of weed and his pipe, and then after he gets high he has fiddlers who play music for him.
14. Two kids named Jack and Jill went up to a well, which was located on top of a hill, to fill up their bucket with water. However, on the way, Jack fell down and split his head open, causing a traumatic brain injury. This horrifying sight caused Jill to also fall down the side of the hill, however her injuries are unknown.
15. The Muffets' daughter sat down to eat her curds and whey, apparently because her town doesn't have McDonald's. She was outside, so she probably should have anticipated this, but a small spider crawled up next to her and it completely freaked her out, so she ran away. Hopefully she left her curds and whey there and found a Waffle House.
16. Another girl, also named Mary, had a lamb. She was more successful than her predecessor, Bo Peep, presumably because she only had to take care of one lamb instead of a lot of sheep. Mary made sure to take this lamb everywhere she went. This lamb was very white.
17. During a terrible rainstorm, an old man, who was snoring, slept through the night. However, at some point, the old man bumped his head so hard on something that it rendered him unconscious, or perhaps dead, as he was unable to get up in the morning.
18. Some person has a nut tree. The entire tree produced only one nutmeg and a golden pear. We have no idea why one tree would a) only produce two items, or b) why those two items would be entirely different, i.e., a nutmeg and a pear. The novelty of this tree was so great that it caused the King of Spain's daughter to travel all the way to this tree, just to see it.
19. Three grown men are in a bathtub together naked. One man is employed as a butcher. Another of the men is a baker. The last man is a candlestick maker. All of them are "knaves," meaning that they are shady characters, perhaps immoral, of humble birth, who may be male servants.
20. There is a little boy, possibly a friend or relative of Bo Peep, who is supposed to be watching over a sheep and a cow. He has abandoned his responsibilities and decided to take a nap. He does this underneath a haystack so he won't get caught.
