Gilded Mules Poem by Shiraz Bautista

Gold-laden mules, beasts of burden, laboriously toiling in their quixotic quest to become princely potentates,

Spinning in a joyless cycle, sparked by embers of short-lived pleasures behind brittle walls of opulence and heedless Epicurean delight

Deafened by a calamitous clamor of covetous cravings, the mules' once juvenile joy is now wrinkled from the imposition of multifarious conditions

Silently swept away from the shores of the infinite

And soaring toward gold and silver rainbows

All while drinking from the casks of crass carnality, before drunkenly drooping toward death's scorching breeze