"The Epic" by Ryan Sanura Reynolds-Stickney

He sat in the pub and he pondered his fate,
The noise of the street washing o'er him.
HIs dilemma was adding a stone to his weight,
As the barmaid refused to ignore him.

He sat still as a tree in the Great White Whale bar,
Till the tavern-keep shoved him out (gently),
And then ambled off home (well, it wasn't too far),
Crossed the street, still a-puzzling intently.

"For it's day after day I come back," he lamented,
"I give it my all, and for this?
A suspicion I have that my death was prevented
By abstinence, once, by a kiss?"

He approached the great door of his College's House,
And he fumbled about for his key.
He considered right then how his pout and his grouse
Were the same blind, vain searching to be.

For his key, it was gone, for the fifth time this week;
It had doubtless been nicked in the crush
As the bar closed; Oh, yes! That girl'd nuzzled his cheek
And been angry when given the brush.

"Oh well," he though blandly, "It gives an excuse
For my absence, in fear of the Brothers.
I'll put this small reason for flight to good use,
And be rid of this cloister which smothers."

He then turned from the dor and cast off his last thought
Of becoming a ven'rable scholar;
He rejoiced in refusing to do what he ought,
And tore off his despised tight shirt-collar.

His fellows in study missed him not at all
Till the Master inquired of the teachers,
Who admitted they'd heard he'd been killed in a brawl,
God preserve him, that drunkest of creatures.

This lie suited him fine, as he wandered in town
And was freed of his worldly possessions.
He abandoned his razor, grew filthy and brown,
And he learned to record his impressions.

By and by, he was starving, so asked for a job
In his pub, Moby Dick, and was staggered
When they laughed in his face and they called him a slob,
And they turned him out, rumpled and haggard.

He cursed them out roundly and lay in the street
With his skeletal fist shaking wildly.
Out of pity, a passerby tossed him a sweet,
And, astonished, he chewed on it mildly.

He had never been one to indulge to excess,
Despite all the beliefs of his Order;
He would simply ignore any form of address
And stare, blind but alert, at the mortar.

Still, they'd think he was drunk, and addicted to drink,
While the baker assumed he loved sugar,
And this candy a stranger gave caused him to think
That perhaps he'd been somewhat a bugger.

For, though hungry he'd been, and as thirsty as sin,
He was not without all means of seeing
The costs and the benefits there were to win
For himself, not without sense of being.

He was surely dependent on no one at all,
(Though his insides might protest and grumble),
And thought that truly better than life in the Hall,
Locked when one heard the portcullis rumble.

So he creaked to his feet and he started to walk
To the outskirts of town, to learn farming,
But the brute strength required of him cause him to balk,
As he found the tasks highly alarming.

What then could he do, this free soul of a man
If he couldn't support his own hunger?
It seemed options were few, and the only good plan
Was return to his mum, so he rung her.

She was quite disappointed in him (though at first
She was gald that he hadn't been killed),
And she told him he'd come to the worst of the worst,
And hung up on him. He wasn't thrilled.

He had already been (so he thought to himself)
Through the trials and hardships of growing,
So what now could he do to acquire some wealth
And still stay free as wind freely blowing?

For he hadn't adopted the creed of the street,
Hadn't learned the skills needed for wand'ring,
But still coveted money and water and meat,
And then once in awhile, a good laundering.

He had missed the one lesson which he might have used:
The Great Sages, who'd been mostly nomadic,
Had eschewed that desire which he most abused:
In his selfishness he was emphatic.

It was not that he wanted to own things, per se
For he'd left all his school things, and gladly,
But it seemed to him that, at the end of the day,
Things should come, if he wanted them badly.

He had not learned to work, or to save things that fell
In his way when he didn't quite need them.
He was quite a rude jerk, as attested to well
By his faults; not his mother would plead them.

As he ambled down Silver Street, down to the bridge,
Contemplation of rivers consumed him.
Thoughts of jumping took on his small conscience, a midge
Facing spiderwebs; silence entombed him.

"Jump, you ruffian!" a voice cried, dispelling his mood.
He looked down at the girl, and said, "Blimey!"
She consumed his attention, that miracle, food
Even failing to move his hands grimy.

Ne'er before had his heart been so moved in his throat,
Not his stomach been more of a blighter.
She was glaring at him from the prow of a boat
And his head was quite suddenly lighter.

It took five minutes walking the banks in a trance
Till he registered she had a dinner,
And then even that knowledge was gathered by chance
When she took him in hand, priest to sinner.

He was limp at her feet as she rowed him along,
Taking heed of her indignant ranting,
And he soon came to know the true wanderer's song
As he soaked up the lore she was granting.

She'd been watching him long, he learned, stuffing his face
with the plenty the boat had provided,
Ans she thought he'd been born to a perfect high place
From which jumping could not be derided.

"It was sheer opportunity, idjit," she said,
"To prove once and for all that it's easy
And respectable, even, for privilege's head
To survive in the street." He felt queasy.

"If you'd only had sense!" She exclaimed in despair,
"And adapted your wants to the moment!"
She was nearly reduced then to tearing her hair,
As his stomach a mutiny did foment.

He was drenched in humility, then: he had botched
His great chance to be Cambride's Thoreau
He was also drenched in something else, as she watched
Him return her cuisinno dall'oro.

She looked on in disgust, and she capsized the bark
So he floundered about in the river,
While she backstroked downstream as though having a lark;
He attempted to calm his poor liver.

He'd been Dazed and Confused for so long it's not true,
He thought blankly as Zeppelins flew round him.
Then he followed her up off the dock and he blew
Out the breath he'd held in till she found him.

No attention she spared to rebuke him, though now
She no longer encouraged his jumping.
As she flayed him with words, he learned carefull how
To prevent early death by heart-thumping.

Once he gained the control of his mental awareness,
He felt like he'd never been better.
She affected him so that he burned, though in fairness,
He'd def'nitely never been wetter.

So in time he could handle the food that she gave him
And also could follow her teaching,
And he grew in himself to know how she forgave him
When pauses there were in her preaching.

And then one stormy night she discovered his bag:
In a Sainsbury's plastic contraption,
He'd concealed his journal of life as a flag
Of the free, beneath each sketch, a caption.

He'd recorded his wand'rings in perfect detail
And the thoughts that he had on the street.
He'd collected the paper, no matter how stale,
From the ground, to collect his thoughts fleet.

She regretted at once ever scolding this man
For his thoughts labeled him in a second
As the boy from whom she as a girl cruelly ran
After telling his death she had reckoned.

She'd been playing this trick on each boy she had met
For as long as her mind could remember:
She would tell a young, gullible lad that she'd set
His demise in him, before December,

If he'd come with her then and keep her entertained.
She'd then had the allure of a siren...
They would come with her, trembling, though nothing they gained.
There'd been Thomas, and Seamus, and Byron...

And a host more of boys who'd been damned, so they thought,
To an end by the advent of winter,
And been doubtless surprised when the worst that they got
Was a really bad wooden-floor spinter.

But this one boy, who now was her pupil, had looked
Past her beauty, and tried to refuse her,
And been terrified when no refusal she brooked,
And alarmedly failed to amuse her.

She had let him get off with a kiss, and she'd grinned
As he scrambled away in relief.
But she hadn't known that from that moment he pinned
His survival with fervent belief

On the moment he'd made his own choice, and decided
To steadfastly, strongly resist
Her advances. She'd mocked him and gaily derided
His fear, but she let him insist.

Only now she discovered how much she had changed
His worldview, and his mode of reaction.
It seemed her antics had accidentally arranged
For his life to have no satisfaction.

She'd been stupid and yound and she now quite regretted
Her asinine, cult affectations.
This poor man had been snatched by the Order, and petted
And coddled, till all of the stations

He considered below him were truly beyond
And he no longer knew how to work,
Even how to avoid work, or how to respond
To recruitment, how darkly to lurk.

She had stripped him of all of life's most useful guiles
And he'd turned out as one would expect:
Very useless, and failing at all of her trials,
Until she taught him skills to collect.

So she tried to redress the wrongs she had inflicted
And taught back the sense she'd negated.
And she found, on the way, that their goals had conflicted;
His joy in her presence deflated.

For he still kept his base of self-int'rest, and though
She did not try to grudge it him, still;
She had hoped for his conscience to finally know
What it was to live life without will.

She had missed his whole point, so it seemed, for the reason
He'd run from the school in the first place
Was to choose his own was not dictated by season
Of studious demands, in that curst place.

So he learned what she had left to teach, and they parted
Their ways, when he finally tired
Of her very demanding acquaintance. He started
Off, back to find what he desired.

He had learnt all he needed to learn about how
To live well, without working his soul out,
But his teacher kept telling his psyche to bow
To the will of the ways, throw his goal out.

They regretted their differences, but held them fast
And they took friendly leave of each other,
And he made his provisions to helpfully last
Till he made his way back to his mother.

He had cleaned himself up, and he'd learned how to eat
What life gave him, with help of some planting,
So she barely knew him when they did fin'lly meet,
And he weathered her indignant ranting.

Once she calmed herself down, she informed him of things
That had happened while he was out wand'ring:
His old Order had finally run out of kings
To restrict those who spent their lives pond'ring.

He rejoiced in this news and went back to the door
That he'd quit in such haste long ago,
And was welcomed in then as he wasn't before,
For he taught them what there was to know.