Life in the Soft Lane - edit

[dukealien]

edit1;


Anyone can see from my soft hands
how parasitic I’ve become of late:
palms without callouses, nails pink and clean;
loose knuckles never barked in shop or fight.
I’ve even lost my writer’s thickening
along those fingers pencils used to rub;
this week I took a chunk out gardening–
it bled like fun:  a farmer would have laughed.
But then, a farmer wouldn’t understand
how merely getting old could bring in cash
or typing, dreaming, all but mind at rest.
My idle life extends, I own enough
to buy my needs from men with hands still rough.

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Thanks to all the critics!  Despite filling out the sonnet-like 14 lines, the parenthetic had to go, for all the reasons noted; filler is filler and lecturing is lecturing.  "Useless" was also determined to be useless   .

The inspiration, if anyone's interested, was

hacking a finger with a garden trowel and thinking about the supposed way 19th-century New York immigration authorities would determine the quality and value of applicants by simply examining their hands:  soft = rich, educated, and not as much need to check for TB and lice.  In one Ragtime-like magical-history novel I read long ago, a secret group would note the soft-handed and sideline them from Ellis Island, giving the impression they could bribe their way out of all this unpleasantness and record-keeping.  Then they'd quietly execute them and excavate the bodies for hidden gems and precious metals.