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.

Final Boss

Yo! I crack the whip, you play the game.
Every encounter that’s obstructionary comes in my name,
so that you came to become obsessed with my location.
Clues to my identity: denied to the impatient.
Step up! I sense you’re on the precipice of something.
Me, I’m on the brink of delivering your lumpings:
make you load your save up for the fifty fifth time,
make you scroll through unskippable dialog lines,
and you still ain’t any closer to discovering why.
Got technology for lackeys that can hover and fly.
Got them other two guys in their sights and apt to wreck them.
Give the beatdown to you quicker than your finger in Tekken.*

I crack the whip, you play the game...
you’re not going to get the final boss tamed.

Elevated? I don’t give a drip if you celebrate it.
Every time you level up it’s ‘cause I delegated
your demise to the wrong size of minions.
Got a bigger batch coming. Statisticians got a dim opinion
of your chance to survive. Make your time.
I got a hundred billion of them and they’re standing in line
to make you shine light out your special move hole
(cause you got hit so hard by the energy bolt).
And it’s a moat you can’t cross, a key you can’t get.
Ain’t done the right NPC’s subquest yet.
Got to collect bullshit that I done littered in the realm.
I aim the whole game at you to fatigue and overwhelm.

Final boss is the be-all end-all class of society:
very exclusive but not higher than me. All the sobriety
of the day and age might prove indecent,
cause me to find and strangle the baby of Jackie Gleason.**
But then I’m evil and puissant, unpleasant and bent on my ends.
At the final reckoning: too late to make amends.
It’s too late to make friends; I’m infuriated already.
Primest cut of minion, double-corrugated and steady,
stands between Fe and Fi, so go whistle.
Go huddle a hobo corpse. Nestle his bristle.
This towers as your obstacle: my will will never bend!
Doesn’t matter how you struggle, never gets you past the end.

I crack the whip, you play the game...
you’re not going to get the final boss tamed.
I crack the whip, you play the game...

How can you defeat me, you don’t even know my name?

“...aw, boot skidoot. You gotta get outta here.”