Piltdown Man

    Popping out of the dark
    reddish "Merry Christmas" haze
    twinking blinking land of Nod (or
    rather it's Ned, the hefty trucker);
    eyes, steel-belted radials,
    in a rig big like Santa Claus;
    a Stegosaurus
    swinging sabre-toothed tail
    & flexing padded paws
    to gobble night.

    Loads so dreary-weary their chrome-plated
    swamps are debris after a tank battle
    for troglodyte trilobites &
    chocolate coloured ooze
    belching brown down funnel flaps
    to carve deep bellows inside earth.

    Such energetic slaves
    to cough & sound their
    wheezing sandy blasts make for
    breaks in a clearing
    for I see our trucker,
    eons from now,
    wedded to sentiment and rock
    perfectly preserved (to the dismay
    of future inhabitants), a fossilized
    remnant complete with
    steering wheel embedded in his chest
    (forlorn and anatomically correct much as
    dolls used in assault cases).

    In a vision,
    envisage his life
    replete to the last Raggetty-Anne detail
    - straw-coloured hair, for one,
    looms like binder-twine or
    horse-hair thread tugged from a dirty mattress
    which props a toque or baseball cap,
    tobacco staining the resident
    gum chewing Neanderthal
    with tartan lumberjack shirt.

    Contact with Piltdown Man,
    soggy Homo Erectus
    given to gunning engines,
    churning rubber as cavemen
    might in the
    La Brera tarpits.

    Consider a farmer
    brief centuries ago
    stumbling onto a similar scene
    pocketing no cloverleafs
    of his own pasture's making
    but concrete expressways
    looming thru the fog
    & damp, then
    coming to his senses,
    hard-pressed as I.