One Day the Rest (poem)

One Day the Rest

You’ve reached that head-scratching stall

A sporting set of wheels is trundling, but

Leggy and eggy in conception, you ratchet off

Your grace and rhythm paced, more or less

Like a flat tire’s

Ba-whump ba-whump

And if you could die, you would die to a tune

Your steps want more depth than the times allow

Making it a near thing…you know this of yourself

Finding yourself the dreamer and the dream

An exclamation mark appears above your head

Ah ha! what luck to have recalled

Out you go, and off you go, to work, to work

Fittingly attired

Your wife has rollers in her hair

Your ears flop, both, your snouts are like a dog’s

Your problems are domestic

The coffee pot and toaster

A tiny swing band plays inside your radio

Many things you wear, and those you meet

Meet unassayed, censure in its green shoot phase

Before the wars

Not rubble-roused, and fool-me-twice matured

Clouds of steam shoot from ears and injudicious

Games with matches

Demand your resurrection from a pile of ashes

Though fascists, with that merriment particular

To deem the world, the one available to face

unfair, unfair, unfair, unfair, unfair

Their humor grows an armadillo-hide, when it had better died

One Day the Rest

Side of Life

(2019, Stephanie Foster)