I ATE MY POEM
By Seamus O. Sparks
Everybody needs a hobby
It’s remarkable how you can lay in bed
And dangle on thoughts
As the brain uncoils
The great words come
Thru the breach
Of deprograming in the idle hours
It’s the wonderful time
Articulations of a mind that isn’t trying to say
Anything
So you hop up, grabbing pen and paper
Attempting to cast your gut in language
And there is nothing
Dire scribbles on an aggravated night
The piece won’t break out (the fucker)
Just rusty gears cranking and a pile of wadded papers
More crumpled pages
To tell the story of your life
No matter what you do: smoke, pull the cat’s tail, rub your nipples
It’s all a fat bust
Thought constipation
Another brutal round of pulling words to death
And swatting at gnats
And mindless television
Then your ear begins to itch
The commercial telling you to spend 30% less for 20% more
Makes the itch deep and unbearable
So you jab pen in earhole
And go to work
Scratching like hell
At the emergency room
You stick out
Amidst the witching hour weirdos:
Night victims
Drug freak outs, drunks, wolfmen
Everyone staring
At the pen sticking out of your head
Your insurance sucks, the receptionist is all paperwork and no soul
The doctor gives you shit for smoking
And asks how you came to have a pen
Stuck in your head
You tell him, “writer’s block”
He goes into a half-hearted spiel about his son
Who is a writer
And graduated Summa Cum Laude
Travels the world, wins prizes, publishes, flourishes
With a fast car and a leggy blonde nibbling his
Fancy leather belt
You tell the doc that you’re not really a “writer” writer
Just some guy with a pen stuck in his head
He tells you, “Everybody needs a hobby”
As he removes the pen
You look at the pen, you see the blood
You think of the thousands of crumpled pages
And the crumpled lovers, friendships, evenings, brain folds, blankets, nerve endings,
conversations, choices, opportunities, plans, hopes, strategies and dreams it took to bring you to this moment
Then he wishes you luck with the writer’s block
Thoughts while eating Pad Thai after therapy
There is the word, there is man
Of the world, and the light
To puke his way past
To reason his way out
Liver of life
Dier of deaths
He can’t remember when the sun wasn’t a hard-boiled egg yolk
Stuck to the sky
The man, created he shopping malls and soda pop in his own image
That he be sick with life
Long before he dies
By which time the game will already be fixed
And the peace already broken
Between the pig animals and the cannibal babies
All men are created equal until they eat shit
And then it’s another story
But for today, blessed are the meek, and the actuaries, and the direct TV subscribers
And the man
For thine is the sex: to measure his dick
The drugs: to measure his doom
The rock-n-roll: to measure his sins
And he looked around and saw that it was good…
Or, at least, as good as it was ever gonna’ get
I ate my poem
I ate my poem last night
We got into a vicious fight
It tasted wasted sunken drunken
Then I lumbered then I slumbered
Long I slept and loud I wept
At once I was awakened and once again mistaken
To try and sit and try and write
About the poem I ate last night
Because my thoughts could not agree
Did I eat the poem
Or did the poem eat me
About the Author:
Seamus O Sparks is an unpublished writer from San Marcos, TX. He works a menial job and doesn’t interview well. Besides writing Seamus likes to sit and worry and generally waste time.
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