The Crown in the Family Jewels

For His MAJMsty.


The king, master of his tiniest of domains and weighing in, last he checked, at all of 220 pounds, was yet a king modest of purse, for he lacked the power to tax anything more fecund of coin than the chump change of his readers' patience, and was thus bereft of a permanent brace - or even a temporary retainer - of servants by whose ministrations he might sate his boundless and wanton appetites.

But O, could the king dream!

Especially after several 24-ounce cans of his favorite 8.1% brew - ha ha!

Had he but the power to enlist his choice among his subjects from nearby estates, he should think first of pleasing his opposed ends capable of feeling the most intense of earthly joys.

So in his mind's eye he gets himself, already, the ripest of young boys, no older than thirteen or fourteen, and after teaching him to cook and bake and brew and make crust and shop for heavily-discounted victuals, imagines him feeding the king at all hours bites of fresh pizza and sips of malt liquor, followed by spoonsful of Espresso Chip and Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup ice cream of only the finest of store brands, and forksful of finest vanilla layer cake privately baked for him on the royal farms of the shires round the nearby County of Pepperidge.

Then, to please that opposite (in its lacking a brain not least) of his ends craving round-the-clock stimulation, he imagines himself enlisting the hands and the mouth alike of the ripest of young maidens, no older than fifteen, sixteen tops, within a twenty-mile radius - 

for the thought of waiting at this point to satisfy his wildly throbbing fantasy in even one minute more than thirty, even were a maiden from the next county comelier of Asiatic* 

*Did we mention the Asian part already - what, the Google Image of the cover of Orientalism wasn't enough of a giveaway?

skin and in technic of hand and of mouth alike more adept than even the most lasciviously hymned-in-penknife-on-communal-privy-wall townie, might prove fatal or at least very very frustrating - and setting her instanter upon her arrival to the task of kissing his gout-inflamed feet all over and laving them** 

**The wholly unexpected appearance here of The King's Feet forms an instance of what the royal literary critics, Cambridge-trained to the last and thus capable of knowing their Empson from their Leavis from their Kermode at fifty pentameters, would call dramatic irony. Those hoping for, rather than The King's Feet, the appearance instead of what The King's Censors bid us call The King's Inches (which The Queen, The Royal Bitch, hath dubbed "Rather of the Singular" in ways not intended to Crown), will have to Spring Eternal for the password-protected Platinum Platform of the regal blog, which is now barely legal in at least one state county. And speaking of royal critics who Tudored him in days of yore and also mine his, he per royal parchment to his blogging jester would like to take this MLA-footnoted opportunity to thank his Lord High School Shakespeare teacher, Mrs. Martin, whose renewals of tenure by the trustees of the realm prior to his enroyallment - whose failure to be barred by the Board - ensured that My His Majesty would never be bored by the Bard.

tenderly with finest store-brand sunflower oil imported from Kansas or possibly even Nebraska, assuming, of course, any be left in the pantry after the mixing at royal bowls of his great Everests of Chef-Boy O.D. pizza crust from dinner.

A third and last ripe young servant, of no more than seventeen and of whichever gender was closest to the Royale Recque Roome alreadie, would be tasked at any hours or at all with finding the king's remote, be it wedged in cushion or dropped in moat.

It will be seen, already, that the king, being Forward-Looking and as Progressive as the most right- left-thinking of Democrats or most cable-brined of automotive underwaterswriters, had in mind far more than his own wantin' pleasure, seeing in the eye-fluttering fantasia above one small step toward advancing Education, the much-demoted vocational sort not least (apprentice pizza maker and spa-lady trainee for starters), and tackling Youth Unemployment the minute it begins, all the while suppressing social unrest, as a king at once hungry, dry of throat, chapped and unloved and unlaved of foot and unwilling to get up to change the channel oft proved more inclined to yell at the royal TV should the residual show turn out to be a repeat already.

z'ere any pizza left? And I suspect my feet hurt again, but I'm not exactly in a position to know now, am I, up here on peak's pike?