Xenophon Pendelton Dunne
was constitutionally opposed
to laughter, joy or fun
or any other such frivolous response
to the darkness glooming his world.

His alarm clock groaned midnight
at every hour.
If any man needed
Pippa passing by his door,
it was him.

But, for Xenophon Pendelton Dunne,
there were none.

His life was shrouded
by the misery in his mind.

The birthing of a baby,
the stirring of hope,
he sensed were merely
the genesis of another
inevitable doom.

As he crumbled through life,
he was forced to face the normal,
emerging quirks of an aging anatomy,
and his darkness thickened,
as when a new ache flickered
in a newly arthritic joint
or the sudden recurring necessity
for a dash to use the nearest facility
or be glumly mortified by the results
of his unwillingness to yield to the need,
struck.

And no new geriatric-snake-oil huckster
could seduce him towards any,
even temporary, relief.

What was the point?

The aches, the pains,
the tightening of his hinges,
the creaks, the moans,
the disintegration in his bones,
pushed him to a barely premature
sojourn, supine in his bed,
whining his wishing that he was dead.

And finally,
Xenophon Pendelton Dunne,
sometime in the middle of a
bleak, painful night,
was, for the first time in his
miserable life,
both happy and right.

How strange to find,
in ones coffin,
the peace he had so often,
in his glum existence, sought.

For Xenophon Pendelton Dunne,
in the silk wrapped shroud
surrounding him in his grave,
found his forever,
only,
house of the lord.

Amen.