White Rose Bouquet

Album: Tell the Devil I'm Gettin' There as Fast as I Can

White Rose Bouquet

Written by Ray Wylie Hubbard

Snake Farm Publishing (SESAC)

Administered by BMG/Chrysalis

 

 

 

There was a time I was wild young and handsome

Smoking cigarettes when i’s thirteen

At seventeen I was drinking in the taverns

With Irish poets, raconteurs and libertines

 

At twenty-one I was a full time gambler

A card squeezer who blistered the bee

I carried a 32 20 in my pocket

Heeded not the gamblers fallacy

 

Thereupon I was asked to be a procurer

By a young woman of desire named Olivia Mae

So for mutual financial benefits

We opened the house of the white rose bouquet

 

Olivia was a beauty and quite flirtatious

And enjoyed the company of rakish men

Yet we fell deeply in love with each other

And prospered in our house of ill repute and sin

 

Even though I was in love with Olivia

There were other girls and indiscretion

A patron of the house was a physician

Gave me a cure for my transgression

 

One night olive found my hidden blue bottle

With tablets shaped like coffins inside

She mistook them for opiate narcotics

And swallowed the mercury chloride

 

How my heart died when I found her

In her green beaded dress dead on the floor

After her service I cocked the 32 20

For I could not take the sorrow any more

 

Now the house of the white rose bouquet

Fell into disarray and was torn down

The place is now a beckon of decency