Venom Plus

My new and most effective drug (may halt, if not reverse, Parkinson’s “progress”) is based on a synthetic Gila monster venom.

Tim already has a poem for the ‘Venom Drug”, as everybody is naturally calling it:

Hope is Our Word for Elpis

Stephen is taking Gila monster venom

to treat the brain disease I deeply hate.

I pray this treatment hasn’t come too late.

Now he can ride his horse in faded denim,

hawk on his fist, young of the year spring kite

as the rose-fingered dawn rolls back the night.

Parkinson’s has taken too many friends

as I have written you too many times,

grappling with meters and my anguished rhymes.

The greatest of these pitiable ends?

My pope who strode the world like a colossus

as Homer’s longest strophe, the molossus,

leaves its huge footprint in his epic verses.

Jesus, relieve us of our lethal curses.

Bayetta, the variety of Exanamide that I take, is synthetic; no Gila Monsters are harmed, or even harassed by milking, in its making.