The month of August has arrived, and I’m moving along on my quest to post a blog daily. I challenged myself to this intense post schedule. I have used the year 2021 to explore the various forms of poetry. This month I decided to write Proverbial forms of poetry. I will pick a proverb, a short common saying, and use it to create a poem in whatever direction the Muse chooses to lead me. However, you must remember we are talking about Word Daddy here. My Muse isn’t dependability or inspirational. He often leaves me high and dry when I need his help the most. Apparently, Proverbials have no particular rules. I will try not to sound cliché. My next attempt to write a Proverbial Poem, I will call The Junkman.
The Junkman
“A bad workman blames his tools” is a French proverb.
“The problem is I ain’t got
No damn tools,”
The junk man rants, standing in his mess.
“The city has a lot of nerve
Interfering with a man trying to run a business.”
Claiming the victim saying he doesn’t deserve
The order to clean up his garbage
In the middle of a pandemic.
With the standing water,
That breeds mosquitoes
And a growing groundhog population.
As the weeds and clutter grow
We all get what we deserve.
The junk man gripes and complains
If we don’t like it, we can move from the corner.
He’s a workman with old-fashioned tools,
Who doesn’t have to live with the rubbish?
He has thrown us all another curve
By fostering pestilence in an epidemic.
He believes the people down at city hall are all fools.
He’ll placate the officials with a little grease in their palms,
Standing around down at the Mason’s lodge or the Elks.
While he holds the rest of the neighborhood hostage
Because a bad workman always blames his tool
Who is Molly Shea?
Molly Shea is an accomplished fictional short story writer from Indiana who writes short stories and novels about a fictional town called Tecumseh. To read more of her short stories and adventures, click here.
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I didn’t know this was a French idiom and from the 13th Century no less… although and as a former royal engineer the work(Wo)man must have completed a job badly in the first place and then blame his tools for the shoddy work….there was a code that persisted, when I was on the tools, that all work of note be physically inscribed by he/she that did it… I wonder if your Junk Man is better suited to the ‘if you want a man to eat give him a fishing rod’ or ‘blackmail’ an amorphism by Theodore Adorno in Minima Moralia about how authoritarian personality is cultivated as a precursor to fascist populism or the adage ‘if you wait long enough what you want will come to you’… in my experience rubbish disputes are very rarely about the rubbish but about land grab ie one has tobe invited to improve the land use and then can claim it as yours after a period of time… in English Law it’s called adverse possession .. or the scenario could be a dispute with a public authority about corruption and contract kick backs … for a film on these matters see The Beasts of the Southern Wilds…. you got me going lol lol… I look forward to hearing from you tomorrow… the Minima Moralia book is worth a browse… a bit of a head bender though
Thank you for sharing all of your information. The back story is the guy’s dad die and he inherited the property. He started a junkyard in our neighborhood. I guess he is planning to put up a fence.
ah!!! so it is ‘where there’s muck there’s brass’… one of my childhood friend’s Dad’s had a tyre yard… unsightly, but a great place to play.. we built the best of hide-outs… and made some of the weirdest vehicles to zoom about on… talk to the lad…
This place is a little different. The neighborhood kids avoid it.
because the adults do, no? he will make a fortune in the long run… better to get talking to him… he’s potentially their future employer and may be a friend too… some of family are scrapmen and have a wisdom of both money and people that is staggeringly uncanny…fear breeds fear, no?