Consider One (1) Iguanodon

Consider one(1) iguanodon

Reclining ’neath a shady palm

The leaves grow in threes

And sashay on the breeze

Knowing nothing at all of the scruples and qualms

That encumber her wits like the meanest of weeds. 

On this prickly day she was decently jostled

By the melancholy wail

From some prehistoric variation

of a melancholy snail

Who secretes a putrid dreary trail

Of briny rumination.

She answered his holler “O Mollusk, O Mollusk! 

allow me, O Mollusk, to follow! To follow!”

He paused and he nodded

And off then they plodded

And she cried o’er and o’er, “O Mollusk, O Mollusk! 

Is there virtue in living? In grieving? In death?

How free is my will? 

How sacred each breath?

O Mollusk, have mercy, I long for the light!

There must be a teaspoon of purpose, of pith!

A minuscule morsel of merit or virtue,

That sits ’twixt the quarks in the atoms contained

In this wretched cretaceous charade of a life? 

Condemned to eternally suckle for marrow

From a bone carved from stone that’s forever been dry!

The mollusk replied:

“While counting grains of sorry sand through Sisyphus’s silver sieve;

The ties that bind your flesh and mind aquiver, all but giving way;

A supersonic shiver shoots from canine to rib to spine to liver; 

When a horse of a hundred collaborative rabbits

bellows out her hollow neigh; 

Remember, my child, my reptilian friend, 

A broken clock still tells the time correctly twice per day.”

O, woebegone iguanodon,

Beware the dread shepherd of foreign phylum

Whose spiral shell

Leads straight to the Hell

From which you’ve hitherto sought asylum!

So eager to devour

What the mollusk had imparted

She very nearly failed to see

The same bucolic shady tree

From whence the snail and she

Had just recently departed.

And leaned upon the hairy trunk

A figure she did recognize

Her dozing doppelganger,

Resting troubled scaly eyes.