Where Odd Socks Go To: An Odd Sock Poem for Odd Socks Day
Where Odd Socks Go to …
On the breeze, I am hanging and dangle alone
I’m surrounded by pairs but I’m left on my own
and I never guessed this would have happened to me
Now I’m dreading the moment my owner will see …
Just how useless I am that my partner has fled
Just an odd sock who’ll never again take a tread
with my owner’s five toes, to the places he knows
Then unpegged, I am buried beneath all the clothes
And upstairs, I am thrown into that dreaded drawer
where the pants with big holes in and lonely socks snore
But their slumbering hopelessness stirs when I fall
and the gang of grey knickers and worn out socks crawl
In the drawer I am cornered. They slither and sneer
“Oh poor darling, what’s happened, how’d you end up here?
Sporting crowns on your ankles, you bragged you were kings
Supreme rulers of socks, and those leg-warmer things.”
“Look, I’m sorry for boasting but you’ve been there too
We have all had our glory days, when we were new
Always chosen, his favourite, for dates with champagne
and the first in the suitcase for summers in Spain.”
The abandoned all nod in agreement and sigh
and return to their slumber, and nightmares of why?
Why their twins would have left them and where did they go?
It’s the meaning of life that all socks want to know
From a silent dark corner, a baby sock steals
with an owl on his toe and a hole in his heel
“Yes I may be the smallest,” he whispers so wise
and I gape at his sage, threadbare, bobbly eyes
“But the truth is I’m oldest; the master’s first sock
and I’ll still be right here when this latest, odd flock
have been bundled, unloved, to the depths of the bin
filled with grief, in the knowledge, they’ll not find their twin
The conspiracy stories I’ve heard in this drawer
from forgotten lost socks from the times long before
and the gossip prevails but is yet to be seen
that they all disappear in the washing machine
On the fast spin a mystical portal explodes
Well that’s what the say, if it’s true no one knows.”
So together, the baby and I hatch our plan
to discover if really there’s a Sock Promised Land
When the master, next day, grabs the socks for the trash
me and Baby roll tight in a ball, in a flash!
Wriggle free from our fate as we fall to the floor
and then hopeful, we wait, as he leaves through the door
Minutes later, he’s back, with his mind occupied
Absent-mindedly lifts us and throws us aside
With big giggles we tumble on top of the pile
of the dirty, rank laundry. Together we smile
And the next thing we know, we are chucked in the drum
From the porthole we peek as we’re drenched in a scrum
We see our master’s legs spiral off through the mist
as the whirling machine takes control, we untwist
One last gasp, before destiny’s final fast spin
and aghast, we lock toes as the light sucks us in
We’re propelled from the vortex. Behold, what a view!
Where the odd socks escape to, it really is true …
Mark Bird