Mr. Watchmaker
“The watch must have a maker. … we must conclude that nature has a maker too.”,
William Paley, 1802
William Paley
Mr. Watchmaker, what were you thinking
when you gave a man so prone to drinking
the thinnest tube to drain his pee
though a growing gland
of dwindling need.
A gland once raw from overuse
that does nothing now but act as sluice
to slow my flow to nearly nil
so on that nightly visit to the loo
I spend the time just standing still.
And Mr. Watchmaker, was it really that smart
to fashion my ear out of leftover parts?
To repurpose a jawbone to hear the sublime,
the song of the wood thrush,
and lilt of a rhyme.
The voices around me all linked to a bone
stuck in a miniature game of ‘telephone’
relaying vibrations of my tympani
into a brain that hears them
as cacophony.
And you got it backwards with my eyes
(although you got it right in octopi).
You put the neurons up front instead of behind
to pierce through my retina
and leave me part blind -
a small spot of absence at the edge of my view
that fails to register someone who
walking past me one day in the dwindling light
sees the glare of my headlights
as I feel him go bump in the night.
And what a stupid place to put my soul -
in a brain that quakes like aspic in a china bowl,
perched high atop my vertebrae
and jostling in its fragile home
in lifelong terror of its final day.
Could you not have been a decent fellow
and given me more than tepid Jello
to house the most important part of me?
Something more like stainless steel or plastic
that would last for near Eternity.
If design is proof of your existence
and furthermore omniscience,
then my slipshod eyes and ears
and mushy brain have made me an apostate.
To explain away your silence
you’ve left a thousand worthless clues,
while for proof you don’t exist at all,
I need only cite my prostate.
Donald Sellitti
