Podiatry Poetry

Crippled Joe Danger,
for rehabilitation,
rocks in a hammock.

Along with his dog,
Jelly-foot superhero
runs in slow motion.

Falling With Style

I pushed off the ground with my right foot, rising higher and higher.

Looking down to the gently sloping shallow concrete stairs I knew I was too high to safely land without injury.

However, with rising confidence and scissoring legs, I performed many more long lazy hops, skips and jumps, even pirouetting twice during one great leap.

Eventually my lofty bounds carried me beyond the length of the concrete and into a vast sandy gravel parking lot, sparsely populated by dozens of Airstream motor homes.

I glanced off the top of one of the silver RVs looking back longingly towards the edge of the sand lot, the top of the concrete stair slope, and beyond to the overgrown mountain peak where my journey began.

At the topmost stair, before ascending the rugged mountain surface towards the top, I sat to inspect my red Converse Hightop Sneakers.

I heard a couple of fellow travelers descending, discussing how the owner of the mountain peak had installed security fencing, scolding them for tresspassing.

My second journey down the stairs would have to begin from where I was then.

Again!

Random Tasks

I pitched baseballs through a second-floor brownstone window at an array of three basketball hoops, watching as they 'toilet-bowled' around the hoop.

I watched the last ball fall, snatched by a curmudgeonly old queen ant, and taken into her nest, a rusted-out, crushed oil drum.

Hoping to retrieve the ball, I tentatively knocked at the entrance to the queen's abode, but turned away when she gave me no response.

I walked away, taking down a delicate mobile from a ceiling joist as I passed, eventually exiting the giant hardwood-floored gymnasium.

I noticed another identical mobile hanging mistletoe-like in a doorway across the hall so I backtracked to replace the one that I had taken, noticing that the gym floor was now overgrown with plant matter.

Always in Debt

I now owe mob boss Paulie $5,000 for borrowing his white Mercedes SLR.

The problem is that I smashed the car through a guard rail on the freeway yesterday.

Therapist Lies

In order to cut our hour-long meeting short, I fabricated a dream story and retold it to my therapist:

I dreamed that my disembodied head was set to animate along a spline in a 3D computer modeling application which was the product of the combined pitch, frequency, and amplitude of a musical selection.

My face was also set to animate to the music by approximating speech phonemes, the result distorted and twisted my gestures into sometimes strange inhuman expressions.

Urban Hunters

Geocaching near our home, Zack spots a suspicious fertilizer bulb attached to an Agapanthus plant. Strange that this was located at least fifty yards away from where the GPS lead us.

Drunken Camouflage

This is a game where I violently rip out cords from any laptop I see while yelling maniacally, then paint myself silver to blend in with aluminum scraps.

Back To School Shadow

I follow Steve through his first day back in junior high school and watch as he struggles to remember the combination to his locker.

"Sixteen. Twenty-four. Two? No. Three? No."

He checks each number through nine where the lock finally opens.

Later on the bus ride home, he confronts the driver for chewing gum.

Never Park Under a Tree

Both the driver's seat and passenger seat had been forcibly removed.

At least the thieves did not take My First Truck Board Book.