‘Cause you don’t represent yourself
by distilling essences of anything else.
You never were a mere sum of your parts,
always unimpressed with so-called smarts.
You’re one of them insolent throw-back Joes
who value ‘done’ over what anyone knows.

Yet you seem to have inherited a world where brainiacs
consider you practical ones the maniacs.
Folks who never once chopped even their own wood
telling those who have what’s bad and good.
They mostly do this using math
which we’ve already established you don’t graspth.

There are those who smooth the sums of means,
and the rest of us rendered into half has-beens,
so you figure you might as well go fishin’
as care a lick what they might be wishin’.
I swear the longer we beat this path,
the more we seem to suffer aftermath.

After their math gets through with us,
we’ll be ashes to ashes and dust to dust,
studied and measured and classified
according to weight and height and size,
and not one will be the wiser for it,
better, perhaps, to move back to the forest.

You’ve managed more that three twenty ones
and nine meager sevens in the years you’ve run,
family and many fortunate friends
sum up to more than a hundred and ten.
When it comes to statistics it’s wise to be doubting
whomever insists upon doing the counting.

‘Cause your life, so far, seems to count more than numbers,
you’ve seen some of the best and the worst pulled asunder,
and you’ve rolled with most punches—even given a few—the upshot of which fairly represents you
much more than the beans, which weren’t meant to be counted,
hoarded or wasted, much less to be flaunted.

But planted in hopes that they might propagate
and make even more beans, profligate.
Beans begetting beans in an infinite sprouting,
this makes a life worth living, no doubting.
(This also keeps the accountants and auditors
too busy to mess up their sons and their dotterers.)

So have a happy birthday, don’t count the days,
or the weeks or the minutes lest you wile them away
for a half senseless goose said to lay golden eggs.
Be content if you will with the regular ways:
count on your fingers, they won’t let you down,
and count on your family who’ll always be around.

The rest of the counting can’t amount to much
but a false sense of certainty reality crutch.
See stars in your future and carrots on your plate,
eat ‘till you’re full, it’s never too late.
Next year they’ll insist you turn sixty four,
you’ll say, “Seems to me I’ve heard that one before!”

Happy Birthday Big Brother! david

©2013 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: Birthday