For other uses, see May (disambiguation).
May is a poem by Michael Rosen from the book, The Hypnotiser.
May
Characters[]
Transcript[]
May.
A woman called May used to look after us sometimes. Her husband was a bus conductor, and he could wink with both eyes.
Fantastic!
We used to meet him on the bus. And when we got the tickets off him, if we were lucky, he'd wink one eye, then wink the other eye again and again, really fast.
Fantastic!
But best was May, when she came over after tea, we played games. My favourite was, "Raisins". This is how we played "Raisins". We tipped the raisins out of the raisins jar, and we each guessed how many raisins there were: "148" I'd say. "231" May'd said. Then we took one raisin each counting. I take one, 1, put in my mouth, May takes one, 2, she puts it in her mouth, I take one, 3, into my mouth, May takes one, 4, in her mouth, and so it went on. 131, in my mouth, 132, in her mouth. I love raisins, all chewy and sweet, mmmmmm. 201 in my mouth, 202 in May's mouth, 203, last one in my mouth, omm. May had guessed best. She had guessed, 231. But now, we'd eaten all the raisins. They were all gone, the jar was empty, could be trouble. Anyway, then it was bedtime.
At tea time, the next day, we were having fruit salad, and my brother said, "I'll have raisins on this." He went to the cupboard, and he saw the empty jar, and he goes, "Where have all the raisins gone? The jar was full yesterday. Mum, he's eaten them all, look at his face! You can see he has eaten them! Tell him off Mum, tell him off!" And Mum says to me "Did you eat them?" and I say, "Me and May did". My brother says "See? I told you, it's not fair, Mum! He's a greedy little pig!" And then a picture came into my mind of the night before of me and May counting the raisins into our mouths all chewy and sweet, mmm. So I said, "I'm not a greedy little pig", and Mum said to my brother, "Raisins don't last all week you know". But I didn't tell anyone about our game: "Raisins", 203. Mmmm.
Trivia[]
- In the video performance of the poem on YouTube, Michael starts to ""Raisins", 203 mmmm" really close to the 2:03 mark with the "mmmm" part happening during the 2:03 mark.
- It is possible that Michael ate 102 raisins (the 203rd raisin was the last one, which was in his mouth) and May ate 101.
Used in YTPs[]
- The parts where Michael say "Fantastic" are commonly used in YTPs.
- May is a character in some YTP's, usually in an NSFW context.
- "Raisins" and "203" are commonly used in YTPs as well.
- Some YTPers even replace the number 4 from "He was 4 years older than me." (which was taken from Babysitter) using the number 203 to make it sound like "He was 203 years older than me".