I once was the hot new thing. You too? The new kid who stirred the id. I had some cheek; the classroom and rehearsal hall were my geek. If hot was or is your lot, some snot lives who wish you were not. They snide and snark, hide in the dark seeing if our bite is as good as our bark. You and I have fans we won’t declare, who check us out, but all us chickens are so very devout. It’s a bubble with an X, a Y, and Ziminy ways it can break into trouble. Bearded and trim, they take a pass and check to see my hipless ass. Start the music playing, make it rock to kill the clock, or every head bye-bye says and cuts us dead. What a game we had with that bit of fame, excited, jotted, and besotted carved up and knotted. Boo hoo, ca choo if we put you in a stew because here comes the sun, and there’s more will to be done. It was a time so round, so fresh, so fully packed. Do it, take it, crate it, or fake it, juice the flavor, let it roast and coast, mature and savor before any boast. A quantum window flew upward in the day, and we tumbled in full to the brim. Six-winged seraphim busted out glory and joy on the In-Fi-niTE AM radio. It was the Hour Of The Word on a ’56 Chevy heard rumblin’ down a dirt road by the old quarry. That’s the story.
After attending schools on the East and West Coast, Jim Linnell taught theater and dramatic writing at a university in New Mexico long enough to be a chair and a dean and to have a play festival in his name. He published Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama, then had a catastrophic accident that, for a period, rendered him a quadriplegic. After gaining function with a walker, he published Take It Lying Down: Finding My Feet After a Spinal Cord Injury. He lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
