Everyone boasts. I, the frigate Vasa, stopped doing so. <br />The King of Sweden had ordered a Dutch to build me <br />but he stole from the Danes a design to materialize me, <br />then they loaded me with guns, dolls like scarecrows, <br />tipplers, weights on the keel so that I have a balance, <br />they kept changing my design, a mast higher and higher, <br />I became three-story monster, Cyclop of northern waters; <br />with all these we might scare Denmark so to surrender. <br /> <br />I could not bear my mess, so at my first trip I plunged; <br />half an hour my body in sea and my role finished off. <br />My thickness is eight points, this is the mere distance <br />of sailors from drowning, of the crown from vacuum. <br /> <br />For centuries I stayed in waters, then the King pulled <br />me out, sent to a museum to secure tourist income. <br />I couldn’t stand it and decided to kill myself again, <br />so I invited fungi and left them to eat my whole body, <br />same way as wrinkles eat the cheeks of Greta Garbo. <br /> <br />The Nobelists in Chemistry found no solution yet, <br />Nobel himself in the Golden Hall became furious. <br />It was much ado about nothing, a hole in the water, <br />the ABBA sing 'Waterloo' with philosophy’s rhythm.<br /><br />Joseph S. Josephides<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-double-suicide-of-vasa/
