"The Bills"

On a particularly frustrating bill paying day I decided to channel my anger at utilities, banks, and everyone to whom I pay monthly fees by re-writing Edgar Allen Poe's epic poem The Bells. Needless to say it was very therapeutic. :-) Enjoy.

The Bills
By Dale Morton

I

See the mailman with the bills-
Horrid bills!
What a world of deep despair their appearance doth instill!
How they crinkle, crinkle, crinkle,
As I pull them from the box!
While the rain outside doth sprinkle,
And I wish to dash them wrinkled
On the hardness of the rocks.
Losing time, time, time
From signing on the dotted line,
The numeric tabulation that is the source of all my ills,
From the bills, bills, bills, bills,
Bills, bills, bills-
Oh, the anger and the languor of the bills.

II

Now the first damn monthly bill,
Water bill!
The charges so absurd that it makes my heart go still!
How could we possibly have choosed
So much fluid to have used?
Only bath time and the dishes
Does it flow.
A little for the fishes,
For which our young’uns had expressed only gay and childly wishes
Don’t you know.
Oh, endless doth it swill,
Gushing ever and anon from the town of Rottersville,
Through the hills,
Through the mills,
And into my house it spills
With relentless pouring skills,
To the charging and enlarging
Of my bills, bills, bills,
Of my bills, bills, bills, bills
Bills, bills, bills…
To the counting and the mounting of my bills!

III

Here’s the next God-hated bill,
‘Lectric bill!
What ridiculous a figure I am paying for it still!
Yes, I do need light
In the darkness of the night,
But how can AEP
Rashly justify this fee?
Out of line!
Supplied by burning coal and connected to a pole,
From a wired metal tower from which all men cringe and cower,
Crying “POWER, POWER, POWER!"
Bowing to the sparking shower
And the life it brings unto us
And the warmth that doth renew us,
And the enormous lighted signs!
Oh, the bills, bills, bills,
I’ll have to put them in my Will
Once I die.
How the visions shout and scream
On the television screen
Oh, to shut it off, what I wouldn’t try.
Yet I know I really can’t,
All the buzzing,
And the beeping,
How the noise it raves and rants,
Yet I know I surely could,
That the sounding
And the pounding,
It would cease, it truly would
If I were standing and refusing to pay all my monthly bills-
Oh, the bills-
Oh, the bills, bills, bills, bills,
Bills, bills, bills-
If I could rip up and then burn up all my bills.

IV

And now the final cursed bill,
Mortgage bill!
When shall these dreaded payments stop, I think they never will!
Thirty years unceasing,
With my interest rate increasing,
Oh, the damned unholy menace of this loan!
For every check that goes
I am poorer, Heaven knows,
Thus I moan!
And the banker –ah, the banker-
Who infects us like a canker
In our bones!
He keeps calling, calling, calling,
Even on my pocket phone.
How he shouts at me for stalling
How beats his heart of stone-
He is neither man nor woman-
He is neither brute nor human-
But a TROLL!
And his king, the mighty dollar
That he hordes, hordes, hordes,
Hordes.
A slave unto these bills
How I want to swallow pills
And put and end to all these ills,
As I scream, scream, scream
Like a pot of boiling steam
To the horror of my bills,
Of my bills!
Losing time, time, time
Signing on the dotted line
For the paying of the bills-
Of the bills, bills, bills;
Oh, the paying of the bills;
Losing time, time, time,
As I kill, kill, kill
All the bankers in my mind.
Oh, the bills, bills, bills,
Hear them moaning, moaning, moaning
As they cry out to be paid,
And demand that check be made,
As I watch that last amount
Be withdrawn from my account,
For the bills, bills, bills, bills
Bills, bills, bills,
For the mailing and the wailing of my bills.