Abel Melveny

I bought every kind of machine that's known -- Grinders, shellers, planters, mowers, Mills and rakes and ploughs and threshers -- And all of them stood in the rain and sun, Getting rusted, warped and battered, For I had no sheds to store them in, And no use for most of them. And toward the last, when I thought it over, There by my window, growing clearer About myself, as my pulse slowed down, And looked at one of the mills I bought -- Which I didn't have the slightest need of, As things turned out, and I never ran -- A fine machine, once brightly varnished, And eager to do its work, Now with its paint washed off -- I saw myself as a good machine That Life had never used.