Thumb nail sketch

Pollex Bollocks

To see me now bent hard at the middle,

doubled over my double by my side,

noses to the grindstone, shoulders to the  

Wheel

You’d never believe it but there was a

Time

before the wheel of time rounded on us;

two jaunty so and so’s, jacks-of-all-trades

proudly brandished by Homo habilis

and all of his descendants, we had our

fingers in every pie, the plumiest

jobs all came our way, the fanciest cars

all going our way.  Smirking presidents

on carrier decks to the lowliest

of bankers flush with a fat bonus check,

arms extended in exultation, thrust

us toward the heavens when they weren’t busy

jamming us in someone’s eye or tipping

the scales with a deft sleight of hand we were

only too happy to finesse.  But all

that’s changed now.  Like the mighty Chicago

River Darwin’s Theory has been reversed,

perhaps by a wrathful God who just pulled

the on-screen keyboard out of His ass one

breezy Saturday morning proclaiming

it adapted to us, dooming us to

spend the rest of our lives in a Downward

Dog pecking out billions of lonely misspelled

missives, chickens come home to roost at last,

hands rendered useless, devoid of fingers.

Awesome sonnet!

I Love You More Than

I’d walk a mile on the bottom

of the sea or river deep, mountain

high remain sound professions of love.

Even a vow to crawl across

the burning desert or be a willing

fool still hold water in some circles

I suppose, a cinch-tight bucket that must

include all those allusions to a love

greater than life itself or anything

uttered by Barry White including the

prosaic, be a good girl baby and

pass the salt.  But as declarations go,

going all the way back to Body and Soul

and Sinatra’s take on Cherry Pies Ought

To Be You, they’re dated as your uncle’s

banjo or fatback bacon and eggs,

nothing that a fresh coat of shellac

or a brand new set of steel-belted

radials wouldn’t fix, so to speak.  Try,

I would rip open all the clam shell

low-density polyethylene

packaging in China with my teeth  

for instance or girl I’m gonna friend you

till your back ain’t got no bone next time

you’re down on one knee casting about for

a really awesome term of endearment. 

Me?  Call me old fashioned but I’m still

partial to that old chestnut, the one

my daddy and his daddy and his

daddy before him used to great effect:

I love you like a caterpillar loves

slow, eeny, meeny and miny love moe,

a wide muddy river loves the sea,

for your love a big old dancing bear I’d be.

raking leaves

Autumn

Tempting to lay in the yard looking up

at the sky this late in the day rake stilled

by my side handle and tines a short hand

punctuation mark, questions rising like

wood smoke to wreath trees humming softly as

they turn in for the long cold night, answers

perhaps nesting high in their branches, but

if there are the trees aren’t saying as they

step out of blowsy summer dresses that  

pool about their feet.  They pepper me with

a cacophony of hued muted prayers,

a burial ritual of tannic

seasoning, the laying on of red and

yellow serrated hands that gently hold

me down, one last patch of blue before first

one eye and then the other are covered

over, lids held in place by summer’s loose

pocket change, broad strokes of paired copper glint.

     

audience of one

A Performance By Odyssey Works

By the day of abduction just after

dinner, the husk of my hammock dangling

light on the chain, deft guiding hands of my

captors like mindful tugs at the water

line easing me out to sea, my debris

field had been mapped, loose marbles counted,

an audience of one in a full house

of actors who held all the cards and dealt

dizzying hands from the bottom of the

deck to unmoor line from cleat and set me

drifting, discombobulation mind you

the destination, like a whirl on the

Salt and Pepper Shaker or a wizened

mushroom popped on a pueblo scattered

across the flat plateau of a mesa

much like this one where I perch past sundown

to await the arrival of broadcast

stars across the rich black bottom land of

heaven and the next big surprise in this  

composition, the book I’ve been reading

surreptitiously replaced perhaps with

a copy in which the vowels gradually

disappear with each succeeding page or

dinner and drinks in some out of the way

place with my long dead father, our waiter,

the barman, everyone in the joint

in on the fix, each and every detail

down to the hand tooled cowboy boots of my

dining companion perfect, even the

sad shade I detect in his twinkling eyes.