She provides the good doctor
with the skeleton of a dress form,
the eyes of a ventriloquist's dummy,
the pointy ears of Nick Bottom,
and the voice of a drunken Greek god,
while he in turn stitches them all together
beneath a California tan.

Yet her creation is still incomplete,
so she borrows the heart from the Tin Man,
right-brain from his friend the Scarecrow,
and the balls from their buddy the Cowardly Lion,
then, with the innards from an old fashioned clock,
a little juice, and a prayer, she instructs
the good doctor to finish the job.

Their monster fully alive,
she sends him forth to face fire and ice,
love and hate, freedom and bondage,
bad haircuts and sloppy tailors,
all within the time frame of a melting clock,
through a landscape full of stairways leading
nowhere, and good citizen torch bearers
out to set the night ablaze.

Finally, her vision about to fade,
she observes the last chapter of her little tale,
the monster abandoned on the ice and left to die,
the good doctor defrocked and sent away,
the dull villagers returning to their routine ways,
and the author long dead before Hollywood
dividends could ever come her way.

G.O. Clark lives and works in Davis, CA. He has work appearing in Asimov's, Dreams & Nightmares, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Small Press Review, and other outlets. He was recipient of the Asimov's Readers Award in poetry for 2001, the same year his book A Box Full Of Alien Skies was published by Dark Regions Press. A second book of poems from Dark Regions is due out later this year.