Without Me They are Nothing (Without Them I’d be, Too)

More of my creatures now insist they want four feet.
They say that while I manage well enough at sketching

heads, I'm not convincing at evincing the acceptable

proportions that should properly inform the limbs of bipeds.

Some decree they won’t agree to be unless I turn them into

quadrupeds. They say I'm tolerably good at drawing those.

I’ve thought of threatening to morph them into hunchback

trilobite-cum-ptarmigans sans feathers, dead-eyed

and grotesquely fat. (No idle threat. I’ve drawn a few

like that.) But collectively they’d thumb their nose. I’ll never

carry out the plan. Try to & they'll slip back into their abyss

as quickly as they can – insuring that I’ll never draw another

woman, trilobite or man. Still I'm tempted to inform the one

who yearns to be a quadrupedal Queen of Sheba: sure,

I gladly will oblige, and then with molto chiaroscuro

make her an amoeba. But without me they are nothing

and without them, I’d be too. So chances are they’ll suffer

through whatever feet they get. And I’ll put up with their regret.

But nothing’s carved in stone: no circumscribing law, whose

spirit, if there were, we’d pay more homage than its letter.

And hey, you never know. One day I might draw better.

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