"Deep Dive" (National Poetry Month poem-a-day) day 14

written by Bruce A. Pandolfo
4/14/2017

One early summer morning on America's West Coast,
a hazmat-garbed La Brea Dave finds himself
Wading through the inky prehistoric adhesive
of Los Angeles' tar pits,
Dave' submerges his face into the hot,
viscous shadow-mucous.
He's done nothing like this in his entire lifetime of professional
or recreational submersing adventuring,
but no robot could do this job.
As the Officer in charge, how could he command
a family man to do something unanimously advised as impossible?!
Dave is the rare type who calls death-defying engagements “kind of troubling”
So he volunteers, 
fondly thinking of Leslie and their grown children,
and then he is suited up soon to be clumsily groping for discarded evidence 
like an insect suspended in amber.

What kind of message would opting out of the unlikely mission send to ambitious villains
if they thought there were timeless impassable pudding-ponds where they could ditch evidence?
It'll be over soon, it's only a nine minute dive.
It has to be brief, otherwise the tar will aggressively consume his hazmat suit!
It ends up taking 77 minutes...

Dave blindly plunges slowly through the gunk,
attached to the end of a navigating pole like an anthropomorphic lollipop.
It's claustrophobia-inducing among these saber-tooth and coyote skeletons..
He succeeds in grabbing on the sonar's vaguely suggested item,
triumphant, he tries navigating to the surface...
Suddenly gripped by the amorphous tendrils of the mischievous coagulated oil
he thinks:
This is it”
Better dinos than I have died in here.”
I lived a good life”
Leslie and I had a great marriage”
the kids have shoved off, well off...”
Despite this, Dave frees himself and gets frantically
yanked out of the exaggerated mire
as though those holding his assisting pole are drunken enthusiastic puppeteers.

He delivers the piece of evidence...
Mission accomplished! 
Wait, no...
He dives absurdly back into the killer muck
to obtain the rest of the evidence,
immediately stuck, he runs through the list of resignations
remarkably he gets free and gets what they came for,
emerging from the pits as if he's awaiting feathers,
but he's humble, not even awaiting epaulets.

The media laud him and when he gets home to his loving Leslie,
she punches him angrily then hugs him, sobbing,
both out of impassioned love.

He made it out of the dark depths again as so many don't.

It helps having something worth coming home to.


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