MALADJUSTED

“Get adjusted, damn you!!!”

I growled giving a good whack

With the side of my wrench:

My victim,

A simple hex nut

Holding together

An important part

Of my structure.

It wouldn’t loosen,

Or tighten.

It barely held

As I cursed

In my rage and frustration;

Once, a while ago,

The hex nut had been

In another place in my structure:

Holding securely,

Shiny and bright,

With no problems,

Working with other like hex nuts,

As if it knew it was exactly

Where it belonged;

One fine day,

Someone decided

The attachment was all wrong,

Shouldn’t be there,

Yanked the nut off

Put the part

Where he thought it belonged

And jammed the nut back in place;

I didn’t say anything,

Let him do as he wanted.

I couldn’t say anything:

Wasn’t allowed to say anything;

After all, he had read the blueprint,

Knew where everything belonged,

How everything went.

I had built it all wrong

And his word was law

Because he said he knew

The Master Builder

Better than I.

That was the beginning of problems.

The nut seemed to be

Where it didn’t belong

As if it knew.

It was in a place hard to reach,

Unfamiliar,

Not near others of its kind,

In a very corrosive atmosphere;

And the man left

Telling me it was now my responsibility

To keep the nut adjusted.

But when I went to do so,

I found it was cross threaded

Where he had jammed it on

And in my attempts to adjust

I stripped the threads

Until it could barely hold,

Knocked off the corners

So that it no longer took a wrench,

And the atmosphere had so eaten away at it,

That it was doomed to failure,

And when it failed,

My structure,

My important structure,

That I had been building all my life,

That held me together,

Would fly apart,

And I would be no more.

It occurs to me

Would I, and the hex nut,

Be better off

Be in a better place,

Be stronger and more secure,

If no one had ever           

Monkeyed around with it?

I’d ask it the question,

But how should it know?

It’s only a nut-

A simple hex nut.

-February 5, 2011

  Chip Bergeron