New vegetables

This is the first part of my latest-poem in progress — Rutabaga. It's also the 700th post of this blog, which is a milestone of sorts (insert self-congratulatory back slap here). I still have more installments of my poem Two Souls to post, plus a new drawing called Smile. I do tend to get easily sidetracked.

Rutabaga
By Francis Scudellari

I.

In a loose fit hood, he hides
his big, rutabaga head
plus a too-close-tucked secret
whose pouty, bent-lip outlines
you might spy while skulking late
in dimly lit alleyways
and assume the dastardly
not knowing his wishful theft

Only as a half-hinged door
pushes the night behind him
does he lift the thick gray wool
and scratch his crown's screwed-up stem
of patchy brown leaves that flop
and fall over bulbous back
to the spur of a chin knocked
crooked by time and man's hands