“Mama-Mia!” Mario moans. The arthritic ache as he stands
a bigger pain in the ass than Bowser was in days of his past.
Hair grey as the castle walls, only now it’s weeds he attends
each year is a level up, but at 8-4 he’s nearing his end.
The plumbers peach of a pension plan replaced his consort
once he gave up on always trying to chase a lost cause.
He never gained his top score, didn’t have the heart to ask,
and unrequited love’s as hard to handle as Piranha Plants.
So garden landscaping’s become his only option for now
watching their stout aspirations grow, then chopping them down.
There’s solace somehow in the serrated-edge of his scissors
a sense of fulfilment in decapitating the heads of his victims.
Each petal depicted the delicate visage he harboured so long
and yet its stems were as twisted and barbed as her tongue.
The gardening goomba attacks the bloom as it blossoms
pruning it often but never tackling the root of his problem.
It’s perfumery pollinates the wanton wind as it blows
tickling his nose like shaven-moustache whiskers of old.
The scissors he slowly squeezes signal his sanity
slipping from the fingers as gradually as his grip on reality.
Stygian shadows reach out tenebrous tendrils that hope
to envelop him whole and permeate the depths of his soul.
The ever-encroaching evil places death within his sights
with our hero remembering that time was never on his side.
The enemy invites him to a land far, far away for adventure
and gamely he enters the Final Stage of...
dementia.