The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Sandville One that day.
The boundless, barren, lone, and level sands stretched far away.
The traveler who’d tell the tale now gazed on it alone.
A king’s cracked visage lay beside vast, trunkless legs of stone.

His name was Ozymandias, a name of great renown;
Upon his monumental visage glared a potent frown;
A wrinkle curled his lip; he wore a sneer of cold command,
Asserting the calm certainty that he would always stand.

Oh, somewhere in this antique land the sun is shining fair;
Great Works that tower somewhere cause the Mighty to despair;
And somewhere there is more than pedestals and sand about;
But the King of Kings is joyless—mighty Ozy has struck out.

*****

Max Gutmann writes: “This was part of a series of comic pieces crossing famous poems with each other, not a particularly unique idea, as proven by The Spectator, which ran a contest on a similar premise a few months after I wrote the first of the batch. One of the early ones appeared in that Spectator issue. This one appeared in Light.”

Max Gutmann has worked as, among other things, a stage manager, a journalist, a teacher, an editor, a clerk, a factory worker, a community service officer, the business manager of an improv troupe, and a performer in a Daffy Duck costume. Occasionally, he has even earned money writing plays and poems.

Graphic: “The Pharaoh Ozymandias at bat”, Robin Helweg-Larsen and DALL-E.