Mule
Because nothing, positively nothing, had gone wrong
For way too long a time
(It was an unabating seven years of plenty,
Day in, day out, seemingly for millenniums),
He began to grow anxious, superstitious, paranoid.
It was just too good to be true, all of it —
His financial prowess, his standing in the community,
His unblemished record of health,
His legendary success with the ladies (he was a bachelor),
Life in general and in its specific details.
Within two days of his first recognition
That things were way too copacetic for his own good,
He came down with parallel cases of carbuncles and boils
Sufficiently virulent to rival the Biblical plague
That laid low and scarred multitudes of Pharaoh's people.
Shortly thereafter, with the pustules raging flagrantly,
He contracted a vicious case of the clap,
From one of the debutantes in his social-rotation harem.
Not a week later, he learned that his entire fortune,
Invested with Bernie Madoff, had been Ponzied into oblivion.
In less than one mercilessly beleaguered month of Sundays,
He'd gone from having the world by its short hairs
To having the world painfully yanking out his short hairs,
So much so that he proclaimed his condition, himself,
Down and out, non compos mentis, null and void, kaput.
And that was when he realized life was a duplicitous shit,
Like a mule that'll pull your plow, for thirty years,
Through thin and thick, waiting patiently for one chance
To kick you between the eyes,
When you bend down behind it, to dig a stone out of its shoe.
But by then, his thoughts were of little consequence,
In the long run (short run, too, for that matter),
Since he'd determined that his next course of action
Would be to hitch that fractious mule to himself
And let it pull him to the glue factory.
12/17/08 - (1)
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