Yes, it rhymes after a fashion and yes, it has a regular rhythm of sorts and no, I am not going to quote the whole thing — I have no wish to drag my finger nails down the blackboard of your soul.
The odd thing about writing verse, however derivative, however wince-making, is that it sticks.
I was cutting my toenails.
Time was when cutting the toenails was the thoughtless work of a moment.
One bent lissomly at the waist, studied each toe nail momentarily, clipped its pink excellence into uniformity, then straightened at the waist and went about one’s day.
Not so now.
Now it is more like a military raid, a raid planned but repeatedly put off, until yet another unattended nail pierces yet another sock and emerges into the light blinking like some newly-hatched reptile, and it can be put off no longer.
In order to bend lissomly at the waist one needs to have one.
So today rather than going to the toes I bring the toes to me, by placing a foot on the arm of the sofa and leaning in.
Leaning in compresses a wad of hard-earned belly fat against the raised thigh.
Belly fat resists compression.
So every attempt on a toe is like a submariner’s plunge, diving below and trying to stay below while that fat is urging me back.
In general I can stay down long enough to do two small nails or one big one before being bounced up for air.
And what nails they are.
Where once they were all pink and regular and delicate, now they announce their age — wizened, misshapen, the colour of camouflage nets.
The nail on the little toe would not disgrace an iguana.
The nail on the big toe could plate a battle ship.
To accommodate its gnarled thickness the jaws of the clippers have to be opened to their maximum and when the squeeze comes on it’s touch and go whether the nail or the clippers will snap.
If the nail gives, it does so with an audible crack, letting fly a shard that could take down a passing pigeon.
After perhaps half a dozen plunges to the basement all the toes were done and I felt in need of a sit-down.
It was then that the chunk of 50-something-year-old adolescent verse leapt out of the shadows of oblivion.
Deep on the southern frontier
At the far extremity
Insidiously growing
Lurk my toe nails. Are they me?
It isn’t Shakespeare.
I don’t like insidiously and I don’t like lurk, though both imply a legitimate sense of alienation from one’s toe nails.
But I do like the question at the end. Are my toe nails me?
It seemed a fair question to put half a century ago and it still seems a fair question to put.
In one sense, my toes are obviously me.
They’re part of the flesh that bears my name and as the paragraphs above have illustrated they have aged alongside me.
But in another sense they become more questionable.
They are clearly evolutionary relics, left-overs from the claws or talons of my reptilian or mammalian antecedents.
I barely need them. They no longer protect me, they no longer serve as weapons, they no longer grip prey. But still they grow.
They grow without my urging them to do so.
There is no truth, apparently, in the belief they will continue to grow after my death, still they grow independent of my will.
I cannot control their growth, just as I cannot control my digestion, or my liver or my immune system.
So, how justified am I in calling any part of me me if it operates autonomously, as toenails do.
My nails are more like dogs that I feed and house but that are deaf to my commands.
What are they? Who am I?
What’s the relationship between us? What do I even mean by the word I?
Were these the questions I was asking as a teenager?
If so, I couldn’t answer them then and I can’t now.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
