I Can Read Your Mind Poem by David Lewis Paget

I think she came from a Gypsy Clan
Where Dracula spilt his blood,
All that way in a caravan
To live in a field of mud,
But she danced like a whirling dervish,
At the campfire by the sea,
While I looked on like a love-lost one
Each time that she looked at me.

She wore a bright red rose in the hair
That was long, and thick, and black,
And dangling golden earrings,
With a shawl across her back,
But I stood transfixed as she twirled and kicked,
I felt like a man who begs,
Her skirt flared out as she danced about
And all I could see was legs.

All I could see was legs, I said,
The legs of a country girl,
The fine and moulded calves and thighs
That had danced half round the world.
She smiled with a hint of mystery
As she flashed her cute behind,
And said, ‘I know all your history,
For I can read your mind! '

She danced away in a sort of play
Now she'd got me on the hop,
I didn't know where to put my eyes
On her breasts, or eyes, or what!
She certainly was a buxom girl
But her legs had made me blind,
She kicked up high and she showed a thigh,
That said, ‘I can read your mind! '

I hadn't much of a mind just then
It was all consumed with lust,
Why can a thigh make a grown man cry?
I thought it was so unjust.
A man could dance til the cows came home
But it wouldn't raise an eye,
While the other kind could make men blind
At the glance of a naked thigh.

I shook my head and I turned away
I couldn't take more of this,
If that, her wheeze, was merely a tease,
She'd cornered the world of bliss.
But she stopped her prance and her wild dance
As I walked off into the trees,
She followed me from the clearing there,
Kicking up autumn leaves.

I turned, as she was behind me then
And pressed her against a tree,
I said, ‘Just tell me your Gypsy name, '
She said it was Chavali.
‘Well, Chavali you're a teaser,
Are you really one of a kind? '
She raised her eyes to the northern skies
And said, ‘I can read your mind! '

We wandered into the furthest woods
And we found a bed of leaves,
I couldn't tell you what happened there,
Though Chavali skinned her knees.
But now, today, it's a world away
And I'm not a man who begs,
For every time, she can read my mind
And flashes her Gypsy legs.

18 November 2014