Fool’s Gold

I remember I once had friends of three.

Young, naïve and fun were we.

Born were we in the depths of the tree

Of love, friendship, happiness and glee.

Despite our joy and rapture,

We were not free of the threats of capture

Of the spindly arms of Problem’s fracture:

Our lives were not of an honest stature.

Friend the first had a mother sick of cancer;

Friend the second was a crippled dancer;

Friend the third was in the debt of a gambit prancer;

We were dead poor and gold was our only answer.

So it came like a windfall,

When the wealthy merchant’s chest had to fall

From his weary horse just before the stall

That led to my grandfather’s hall.

There was a tossle and a scramble.

Friend the third slew the second with a stone to the head in the short hustle.

While I looked over the first’s dead body clenching a bloodied knife’s handle.

The good in our lives had been snuffed like a wicker candle.

We closed our innocence with guilt, but we had to open that chest.

So fiddling with murder stained hands we laid to rest

The lock that had put us to test.

So that we may never find again God’s nest.

In the bosom of the box,

Stood life’s greatest paradox

Our hearts became rabbits trampled by an ox;

The gold was only a single shilling pox.