Sam Campbell

A thumb, you see, is a lot like a life

in that the simile dies with the bones.

Tawdry, the attempt to reconcile 

what will be left behind with what will never leave.

Henry will never leave the driver’s seat 

of each passing car. So, when one stops,

kill it. And the next. And so on

this road bloody crawls an ideation

that progress is measured from its beginning

outward, reaching from an eye 

with a delusion, and I will call it a delusion,

that its destiny is to be found

And is not that of the tumbleweed,

which it is, rolling dead across a road 

and smashed by Henry’s car

to manifest the only impedimenta necessary

for discovery—the thumb and its bones.

Kill it.