Of Male Bondage...Bonding...Bondage

Two posts in one day. Some kind of record.

Verily, The Poet has said:

On Male Bonding
--July 2003, Amtrak, somewhere between Penn Station and South Station

Behind a successful man, they say
Lurks a woman or three
Au contraire, I beg to differ,
What about his best buddy?

Enkidu was a hairy freak
But without him, no Gilgamesh;
And could Leander ever have beaten Pete,
If he never partnered with Mahesh?

"He doth not bite", they say,
"The canine that loudly barks."
But Friedrich E. did sustain a Dawg,
That did both in the person of Marx.

Adolf H. had Rudolf H.,
As every dictator must his scribe.
Both were ravening psychopaths,
But together they did jive.

"To be, or not to be?",
That is all good and sound.
Ere Laertes reaches for his envenom'd blade,
I would surely have Horatio around.

Heroes Gallic, I descry two,
I speak, of course, of Aster- and Obel-ix.
And that incomparabale duo,
That revealed the secret of the double helix.

Those ineffably elegant prime numbers,
Demurely inscrutable to mortal man...
They may never reveal all their treasures,
For whither art Hardy-Ramanujan?

He might've been a rotten cad,
Was Raskolnikov, steeped in the ways of sin.
I personally think, his only saving grace,
Was his long-suffering chum, Razumihin.

You'll never get fame, if you're called 'Butch',
But we all know one bloke who did.
I really wouldn't have fancied his chances,
If he didn't team up with the Sundance Kid.

Alimentary, my dear large intestine,
If Sherlock had written all those tomes,
He would've just been a terrible egotist;
Without faithful Watson, whither Holmes?

You find them friendly pairs,
In real-life, myth, legend, and drama
Damon and Pythias, Lewis and Clark,
And, may I add, Krishna and Sudama.

But I shed a tear for that worthy pair,
Those icons of friendship, profound
For Veeru who gave his life for Jai.
(Or was it the other way around?)


And Scheherezade saw the approach of the dawn and discreetly fell silent.