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Priyanka Kumar | + Follow Poet |
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Surprise Ending

There was once a man.
He’d always wanted to write,
But his biggest failing was
That he wasn’t very bright.

Whenever he started 
On a story or a plot,
Before he could pen it
He simply forgot

What he had thought earlier
And he wasn’t very wise
So all he wanted was that
The end be a surprise.

And he made up plots and tales
Funny, sad and intense
But in the end he found that
None of them made any sense

For follow as he might all grammar
He could never be concise
And what is more, the ending
Was never a surprise.

Yet he cherished dreams
Of becoming famous and great
Of writing beautiful stories
Of defying his impending fate

But, for all his boldness
He could never roll the dice
And his stories never ended
In a nail-biting surprise.

He told his tales to children
He tried them on every friend
But they never gasped at 
The crucial part, the end.

He sent them off to editors
Of magazines of acclaim
But they all sent the stories back 
Saying the ending was all the same.

He tried to write a book too
But in the middle he got stuck
And he wasn’t very clever
So he simply cursed his luck

Then finally he gave up
And wallowed in self-despair
He felt life was being hard on him
He felt it wasn’t fair.

Then one of his friends suggested 
That if he really had to write
He needn’t just write stories
To prove his wit and might.

He could simply write a cookbook
Or an instruction manual too
Or a traveller’s guide to touring 
A place like Timbuktu

Now the man wasn’t very brilliant
But he could recognise good advice
When he saw it, so he took it
Though he wasn’t very wise

And he wrote a self-help book on
Coping with writer’s block
It became  a national bestseller
Every bookstore ran out of stock.

And he made pots of money
Because it was reprinted thrice
And he was always very glad
He took his friend’s advice

So now if you ask his opinion
He looks very condescending
And smiles, and says, “to write a book
Who needs a surprise ending?”

Copyright © Priyanka Kumar | Year Posted 2005

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