This Old Man
Keep getting older and hairier
on my neck, back and derriere,
but not atop the pate.
Dear DNA, let’s negotiate!
I’ll trade the fading vision, you could have that back,
plus this 30-year-old-man belly’s kinda wack.
My hearing is nearing deafness and I wheeze.
Yo, please save me from the wrist hurt disease!
It’s infeasible that these, a full list of ailments,
should do anything but accrue. I’ll fail ten
times out of ten to age in reverse like Mork.
Is there anything sadder than a dork
for whom the new hotness is not just inaccessible,
it’s grumbled against? You kids, reduce your decibels!
Don’t make me come over there and shake my cane.
(It’s that rapper from the AARP and he’s insane!)
This old man, he rhymed once.
He put up some valiant fronts.
With a wick-wack bitter lack of youthfulness & charm,
this old man kept rhyming on.
Joints creaking while I squeak around the stage,
hella grandmothers telling me I ought to act my age.
Deranged already, I don’t got no brain medicine.
If we were running out of food on a boat, I’d get jettisoned
or eaten. I’m unsweetened.
Don’t tell me that I got the shortest straw; I’m not a cretin,
just a little senile and gassy and slow.
But I bet I’m very salty! And I could still row.
Let’s gobble on that infant. Infants are useless
(also very soft, which is good, ‘cause I’m toothless).
Come on kids, you want to get rescued or what?
Don’t mumble all amongst yourselves. Speak up!
(I lost my earhorn the other day on the bus.)
You would think by the way you whippersnappers make a fuss
that I said something crazy, profound or obscene.
Wait, where’d the ocean go? Where have you taken me?
This old man, he rhymed twice.
He found this would not suffice.
With a wick-wack bitter lack of youthfulness & vim,
this old man was dour and grim.
Now Frontalot’s shopping for the top of the hill.
Should have bought a burial plot soon as I got ill,
but I foolishly thought that I could put it off;
now I’m ghoulishly fraught with a [cough cough cough].
Soft in the head, hard in the disposition:
how’d I earn this intractable attrition
of the vigor that I figured would be mine for life?
Is there no upside? Well, the rhymes are rife!
Every year I’m alive, add to my vocabulary.
Going to do it till I’m staring at the ceiling in the mortuary.
Plus I’m probably wise by now
and could do all the things old people talk about,
like: count pills; argue bills at diners;
get a little tiny funky car and be a Shriner;
go to the haberdasher so I could look dapper;
get stroke and forget I’m too old to be a rapper.
This old man, he rhymed thrice.
He spoke a thin gruel of lies.
With a wick-wack bitter lack of youthfulness & spunk,
this old man’s rhymes was bunk.
This old man, he rhymed lots;
rhymed till he grew liver spots.
With a wick-wack bitter lack of youthfulness & cheer,
why he rhymed remains unclear.
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