Suppose that the three of us were in the dredging business
and you supplied a sardine punt; and he, a piece of lead;
and I brought some strands of wire rope and a cotton reel
to fabricate the most handsome dragline you had ever seen
and we launched it in the punt trench and start to dredge up mud
until the bucket pinged against something that surely was metallic
which when we fished it out, was an elongated piece of pipe
filled with eleven billion flecks of gold, likely many billions more.
We couldn’t believe our luck but we knew we have to tell the chap
and after he took his signing bonus he swore us all to secrecy
that every thing about this find is smeared in confidentiality.
Now, we are taking them out, six hundred thousand every day
racing to reach one point two million by twenty twenty seven
because some people are spreading rumors, that soon,
gold will be obsolete because people are only wanting silver.
Now that all three of us are rich, it’s the time to fight;
maybe invite someone else like a robber baron or chevalier
to buy my future take of this advantaged field of gold.
But not so fast, my old and former friend
it was my strand of wire rope and my cotton reel
that discovered the pipeline bearing gold
and unlocked the treasure underneath the mud.
It is an added aggravation that you are selling your share
to le chevalier, my current wife’s first ex-husband.
Even if you have a firm agreement, as inviolable as a PSA,
you will have to scrap and cancel it, or renegotiate,
because as the premier co-owner of the dredge,
I assert my preemptive right of first refusal
to match any bona fide offer from le chevalier.
If you cannot acquiesce, then all roads lead to elsewhere
famous as a bastion for talks of tortious interference.
Tulsi Dyal Singh, MD.