"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,
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.
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...
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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