The Lowest of the Highest by Default

He was a homeless jester, a contentious feisty gent.
He shed a sense of triumph everywhere he went.
No amount of scorn and no superior air
ever contradicted his shabby debonair.
In a stovepipe hat, overalls and a tux jacket,
he played his mobile xylophone, making such a racket
that folks rushed out to pay him just so he would quit.
He felt no sense of shame in this, for he took pride in it.

He had the perfect racket. He felt he counted coup—
raking in the dough for what he didn’t do.
He had a fridge crate penthouse on a tower labeled Trump.
(Also a little pied á terre across town at the dump.)
Highest of the highest and lowest of the low—
his main address  the finest though he had so little dough.
The key up to the rooftop he had scored out of a pocket
right after the janitor had gone up there to lock it.

He snitched a maintenance uniform and in the helter-skelter
of a tenant’s moving day, filched his plywood shelter.
It made a perfect domicile obscured in a back corner.
As a joke, on its front cornice, he wrote, “Residence of Horner.”*
But he dragged it to the rooftop’s front when the day was done
and had a view of city lights that was second to none.
You may think that he’s a shyster and the building’s lowest resident,
but only since the former lowest tenant became president!

*Little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating his Xmas pie.
He stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum and said, “What a good boy am I!”

Words for the day are homeless, contentious, jester, amount and triumph. Image by Donald Teel on Unsplash, used with permission.