It occurred to me on the bus last night (around midnight, after getting a full 5 hours of sleep for the first time this week--context!) that this makes no sense.
Unless Moses is dealing with some sort of deeply-rooted psychological denial, he can't suppose something he already knows is untrue. At least, not when it comes to toes. (I'm not gonna say we haven't all supposed something we've known wasn't true at some point in our lives, generally while in love) If Moses knowses his toeses aren't roses, then he doesn't really suppose that they are roses. Just makes no sense.
I mean, right?
So I spent the last leg of my long commute home working it out. I finally came to the conclusion that there are two Moseses in this story, and the sentences are just ambiguously worded. This isn't all that unusual, especially where Moses is involved, because the Bible does this all the time. Seriously, there have been times when I've had to go back and reread a verse four or five times to make sure I knew who was doing what to whom. ("And so he went with him, and he with him. And on the way, he took what was his and hit him, and thus they became enemies from that day forth.") Upon this realization, I tried to piece together which Moses thought what about whose toes. I am assuming here that Moses 1 (or "Moses Prime") is actually biblical Moses, because how many other Moses (Mosai?) would you bring up, first-name only, with no other explanation? Obviously, at least one more, because we get no clues on Moses #2 either, but I am assuming that this was to make a bit of a play on names once Moses Prime has already been introduces. There have been a few other prominent Mosai throughout history, my favorite of which was Harriet Tubman. However, Harriet was a she, and so she doesn't fit my hypothesis about the pronoun confusion above, so we can't use her. A quick Google search for "Famous Moseses" yields the following: "Did you mean 'famous horses'". Which, of course, I did not. I was going to go with NBA Hall-of-Famer Moses Malone, but eventually I decided on Moses Martin, seven-year-old son of Gwyneth Paltrow and Coldplay's Chris Martin, because you could see this kind of misunderstanding happening between a hero of both Jewish and Christian faiths and a seven-year-old.
So, Moses (prime) supposes his (?) toeses are roses. This could very well mean Moses Prime supposes Moses Prime's toeses are roses, but Moses Martin, he knowses Moses Prime's toeses aren't roses as Moses Prime supposes Moses Prime's toeses to be. And now the song makes sense. Contrariwise, you could say that Moses Prime supposes his (Moses Martin's) toeses are roses, but Moses Martin knowses Moses Martin's toeses aren't roses, as Moses Prime supposes Moses Martin's toeses to be.
Either interpretation now make sense.
Except something was still a bit off, at least in my mind. Why would Moses Prime call either his or Moses Martin's toes "toeses"? I suppose even Moses Martin is old enough to have moved past that stage developmentally. Thus I began to wonder if there wasn't a third someone in this scenario. Someone who may have said the word "toeses" and Moses Prime, unfamiliar with the term, assumed he said "roses" while Moses Martin clearly understood the word uttered as "toeses." And then the final piece clicked into place.
You know where this is headed, people.
And that is how, just after midnight and after too many hours on the bus and too few hours of sleep, I determined that the song above is actually referring to a misunderstanding between Moses, the son of Gwyneth Paltrow, and Gollum.
