SALT CELL

Heads aslant, most bowed in reverence mocked, real apprehension,

that three years before jutted with defiance, bristling anger.

Fingers clasping a coronet of despair or cradling a seeming-sapient jaw,

a crabbed hand stalking crablike across grains of graffiti.

Backward leaners or almost-uprights glimmer with confidence, hope,

even serenity.  Rodin maquettes.  But don’t write off the sprawlers and foetals

- one girl presenting as rubbery chicken, neck half-wrung, still scrabbling -

or nail chewers and quick-pickers, worry warts and glazed window-gazers,

as they splutter and crank and spark for the final charge.

Cross-legged kinetics beating a swinging tempo in footloose socks

conduct bursts of staccato with sawing pen or tamp pursed lips.

Beanie buffs with pixie tufts hold steady, noddles heavy with basins of woolly info.

Lleyton Hewitts reverse baseball caps or interpret the lining’s rorshach stains.

Pens become burettes for lippysuction or heavy-handed tooth naggers,

ear scratchers, capita agitantia, potential gougers of desktop,

staff eyes even.  A toss of ponytail dismisses an easy-peasy question;

hair replaited, better get serious; shook loose, tight-arse pressure.

Pencil shavers are perfectionists or poor planners or kool exhibitionists.

Straitjackets are clock watchers, seldom lateral stretchers.

No scrapheap, this mufti lot, entrants in the annual Scholars Handicap:

the perpetual twitching of priapic pens may echo

the scrake of quills on scrolls by lumined scribes;

more so, the signature scratch to salt six ciphers.

                                                                                    Michael Small

November 11-December 8, 2001

August 24-25, 2005