Dutch Jones Disease

Poor old Mr. Jones, always coming down, or happening to, some kind of horrid ailment. I caught up with him back in the gay old nineties. Let me tell you about it:

Mr. Jones, I gotta tell you

You have a strange disease,

You’re the first man to succumb 

To a virus that kills trees,

Your symptoms are unusual

But our data is pretty thin,

As a tree would shed its bark

We note your flaking skin.

Your gait is quite unsteady

As you stumble in your boots,

There’s a striking similarity

To a tree with rotting roots,

And like autumn leaves that change

Drifting through the air,

We notice the alarming rate

You’re losing all your hair.

Though the cause is not determined

There is but one straw that we clutch,

You share a common ancestry

The tree and you are Dutch.