BW on My Wrist

On my wrist

ghostly digital figures

precisely circumscribe

the time before which analogue hands run

If the hands weren't chained to a face

panicked by my sense of slipping

they'd run pell mell

off into the future

On my head

dry ghostly strands proliferate

curling away   out   up

as if alarmed by the tangle of old and new

in the dreaming head

from which they sprout.

---

My father, David Williams, had been working four gigs a day, eight days a week, since 1842, when he heard that a scientist had finally succeeded in cloning human beings. This process made it possible for the adult iteration to be formed, extruded, growth accelerated, and trained such that an experientially identical adult could be delivered in under two weeks. Dad had Dave 2 grown/hatched and put him right to work playing gigs.

 

For a while he played The Shadow of Your Smile, Misty, and My Way, and all went well. Then he began playing original pieces of his own creation, FABulous jazz improvisations, but he proudly gave them memorable titles along the lines of "Rectally You" and "Bash My Head In, You Wretched Pig Sucker." Seems like a genetic error had crept into the mix and all this clone could offer for genius composition titles ( and, increasingly, between-numbers-repartee) was the most foul and scatological insinuations about members of the audience.

 

After a week of that, the clone was feeling severely underappreciated and profoundly depressed, business for The Daves had fallen off to nothing, and their reputation been so damaged that my Dad declared a vacation and took his doppelganger hiking in the Rockies. For hours they sought a mutually agreeable solution as they hiked. At both the summit and the end of their wits, Dave 1 gave Dave 2 one more chance to see the error of his ways: "Do You Know That You Royally Screwed The Pooch That Is My Life?!" he cried. Replied Dave 2: "Know it?! I WROTE it!! Dave 1, at this point, pushed Dave 2 to his death.

 

A short time later, having returned to his home, there was a knock on my Dad's front door. Upon opening, he found there a Park Ranger, Smoky-the-Bear hat in hand, ready to arrest him.

The charge?

"Making an obscene clone fall."