Pharmacist Who Can't Count Poem by Donal Mahoney

Did you hear about the pharmacist
who got hit in the head with a hockey puck
coaching his son’s team on weekends?

This terrible accident left him unable
to count the pills he charges too much for
because Big Pharma keeps raising prices

to keep up with Medicare and he has
to make a profit so he charges
whopping sums that go higher

every week without relief but now
he can’t count any pills to sell until he
memorizes his numbers all over again,

at least from one to three, so he can be
mimic Lawrence Welk, the late bandleader
and favorite of his older customers.

They love to hear him count like Welk.
His wife, Olga, believes she can help
him learn to count again with recipes

she brought in a gunny sack from Europe.
She makes her mother's sour cabbage soup
and prune sheet cake that Gypsies love

in Bucharest and has her husband
down two big bowls a night followed
by a chunk of prune cake, awful stuff.

It’s been two months now but he’s still
a pharmacist who can’t count although he
burps with the rhythm of Lawrence Welk.

He hopes to find relief by patronizing
another pharmacist who will charge him
up the wazoo, that much he knows.