Piltdown Man
By Paul Cameron Brown
Popping out of the dark
reddish "Merry Christmas" haze
twinking blinking land of Nod (or
rather it's Ned, the hefty trucker);
eyes, steel-belted radials,
in a rig big like Santa Claus;
a Stegosaurus
swinging sabre-toothed tail
& flexing padded paws
to gobble night.
Loads so dreary-weary their chrome-plated
swamps are debris after a tank battle
for troglodyte trilobites &
chocolate coloured ooze
belching brown down funnel flaps
to carve deep bellows inside earth.
Such energetic slaves
to cough & sound their
wheezing sandy blasts make for
breaks in a clearing
for I see our trucker,
eons from now,
wedded to sentiment and rock
perfectly preserved (to the dismay
of future inhabitants), a fossilized
remnant complete with
steering wheel embedded in his chest
(forlorn and anatomically correct much as
dolls used in assault cases).
In a vision,
envisage his life
replete to the last Raggetty-Anne detail
- straw-coloured hair, for one,
looms like binder-twine or
horse-hair thread tugged from a dirty mattress
which props a toque or baseball cap,
tobacco staining the resident
gum chewing Neanderthal
with tartan lumberjack shirt.
Contact with Piltdown Man,
soggy Homo Erectus
given to gunning engines,
churning rubber as cavemen
might in the
La Brera tarpits.
Consider a farmer
brief centuries ago
stumbling onto a similar scene
pocketing no cloverleafs
of his own pasture's making
but concrete expressways
looming thru the fog
& damp, then
coming to his senses,
hard-pressed as I.