8/8/19

Yorkshire Alien
By Richard Stevenson


Ix-nay on names.
Know what I’m sayin’?
The little green guy got away,
whooshed off in a saucer.

I got an out-of-focus tosser shot
of the bipedal imp on the moors
above White Wells, near Ilkley. U.K.
just before the booger scampered away.

Didn’t get a shot of the saucer, no.
Whaddaya want me to say?
I was flummoxed and befuddled.
Not so Quick Draw McGraw on the camera.

Sorry. Damn ex would have you believe
I fabricated the imp out of chicken wire.
Tried to create a photo I could sell
to the tabloids. Says I needed cash.

Horse manure! I was after landscape shots.
Was shooting in foggy conditions
where Santa don’t fly missions
in ’87 BCP – Before Cell Phones, doofus.

It had a melon head, stood maybe four-foot four
(looks like a topiary leaf mesh critter
in the photo, I grant you.) As I say,
I snapped it on the fly. Was already turning away…


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Richard Stevenson has recently retired from a thirty-year teaching gig at Lethbridge College and has published thirty books and a CD of jazz and poetry in that time. His most recent books are Rock, Scissors, Paper: The Clifford Olson Murders, a long poem sequence from Dreaming Big Publications in the US (2016), and A Gaggle of Geese, haikai poems and sequences from Alba Publications in the UK (2017).