Tug Dumbly # 60 - Big Bertha

Big Bertha

Three boys tripoded in a park,

heads huddled to phones, and I

of course cast back to my vastly

better kid-dom

                      crouched down

and dirty on hands and knees

behind the school library with the

play-lunch bunch, tongues stapled

to lips, eyeballing a trenchlevel

dirtscape of mini Western Front,

lickin up a strategy to push through

the rough, make an advance on

that big shellhole of catseyes …

shoot straight,

take the mongrels by surprise …

                         

Marbles, of course.

Might be warfare by other means,

just like shopping and children and

fast food, and in fact everything in life

might be warfare by other means.

Including warfare.

                           

… sorry, I’m not sure what that means,

beyond being another pesky

Reductio ad Absurdum,

reducing my point to pointlessness …

… But we press on    

through a planetarium

of Aggies, Botchies, Catseyes,

Chinkies, Glassies, Toms, Taws, Steelies …

Botchies were greenish glass balls,

ripped like roe from car batteries;

Steelies were ball-bearings, pepper

shook from dead engines and machines,

from buckshot size up to pinballs, til

ballooned that crater chokin mutha

BIG BERTHA  

(dum dum DAAAAA!)

Don’t know what crankcase

you was birthed from, beastie,

but it musta been

some monster machine 

you big fat purring bearing you,

slow chundling mercurial moon,

lodestone magnetizing we who

worshiped you like the bomb

in Beneath the Planet of the Apes

supreme sister of heavy ordnance

gimletly fought for, back and forth

on some battle-ground scratched

from a roving front of wild terrain -

grass, sand, pie crust of playground …

wherever we made a hole was a game.

I forget the rules exact …

we called the game ‘dibs’, I know that,

and that you had to chip another dib

with your shooter, over distance,

into a hole of sometimes fiendish design,

some concaved wide, others dug snug

into slopes with raked approach

suicidal as a Jap machine-gun post.

Nested within, the brilliant clutch

of eggs players staked, the pot we

shot for, first to chip in scooped the lot    

leaving the victor dripping a river

of glass globules from grubby mitts

into fatly clacking sack

              

… or something like that

And sometimes some fool staked Bertha

against a shrapnel scatter of smallfry,

catseye trash, spoilies with part glass

sheared off neat as a slice of fruit,

lopped like soldier eggs; or maybe

some big ole greasy Toms, been through

the wars, milky as a mad crone’s eye,

pockmarked as Ray Barrett’s face …  

I forget the wager rate, but it

must have been big shakes against

that big steelie Bertha. She filled a

hole like a cannon ball a saucer, I

mean trying to chip her along, with

even a big Tom, was like trying to

shift a fat lady’s titty with a teaspoon … 

… maybe I stretch things a bit.

But no question Bertha was a big gal

with the precious heft to rip a hole

clean through that draw-string scrote

of your marble sack … oh, she was
a cause to fight for, protect from attack ...   

Where are you now Bertha,

where did you roll to rusted lie?

Where do any of us lie

as planets cannonade

shot into a black hole

to be scooped clinking

into a draw-string galaxy  

by a victor god …  

•