Originally posted 10/29/2009.

When you’re a hammer,
said my high school buddy
Joe The Hammer,
everything looks like a nail.

When you’re a hammer
facing a problem
you do one of two things:
you bang on it or
you pull it out.

It works, mostly,
but sometimes I wish
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
like you were.  But I wasn’t.

I was a hammer, did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed and yanked
and banged my thumb
a lot.  It was
a good living for a long time,
it’s been up and down lately,
but I don’t complain.

You, he said,
you, though. Man!
You write, you travel,
make stories come out the way
you want them to be.
I’ve read some of it, and damn, man.
Damn! What that must be like.
What is that like?

The Hammer
slapped me on the back

as I peeled the label
off the bottle,
studied my unscarred hands,
thought about stories coming out
the way I wanted them to be;

tried to figure out
what kind of tool I was
that I wanted to be
anywhere but there right then.