A Croc in the Field
for Harry Paterson

Today’s operative on the ohrwurm shift
has hacked the WiFi password
in the ear canal and now I’m looping back
endlessly to a misheard lyric:

“you picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,
with four hundred children
and a croc in the field,” and everything
on my to-do list, every book

or magazine or limited event series
on Prime, everything I’ve tried
to hitch the rickety wagon of my attention to
has been denied and defeated

by the image of a homestead straight out
of Norman Rockwell, only swarming
with dungaree’d kids in a grubby multitude
scaling uprights and downpipes

in pursuit of the relative (rafter-strained)
safety of the roof, others chancing
their luck in tree branches or atop a water tower
stencilled with the name of a town

that’s never been known to trouble a map,
while it prowls below, sluggish
until it needs to move: a thousand kilograms
of hungry impatience packed

into 20 feet of gnarled skin, tail decimating
corn like a thresher, razor wire teeth
at the business end; and I can’t help thinking
that in all the scenarios for upping sticks

Lucille picked a pretty smart time to leave.

 

Neil Fulwood was born in Nottingham, England, where he still lives and works as a bus driver. He has three collections out with Shoestring Press: No Avoiding It, Can’t Take Me Anywhere, Service Cancelled and The Point of the Stick, and a collection of political satires, Mad Parade, with Smokestack Books.