Corporate Food Chain

I saw this earthworm
real skinny one, old and long and kinda smart ... looking
but really skinny, like anorexic skinny
and he (they're asexual, so it's not like he has a gender) was
slinking down the concrete sidewalk
but parallel with the grass on either side.
(I guess he wasn't so smart after all)
Every couple of inches he would
grind his head into the ground
looking, I can only assume, for loose soil.

He rammed incessantly: crawl, slam, crawl, slam
and I didn't want to move him, I
mean, I rooted for the poor guy but
I wanted to see what happened next.
He got to a seam in the concrete and
veered right, and the slamming increased
threefold. I thought he was gonna win
the contest.


Then he started to sniff the concrete again
then he turned right around and went
back the way he came.
and every couple of inches he would
grind his head into the ground
I thought he almost had it. Almost.

It's too bad he's blind.
And not six feet taller.

Corporate Food Chain by Michael W. Hyde is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.