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.