Persecuting the Poet

Back at the office, a fanless Wrent passes from solid to liquid to gas, drenched in summer sweat and nostalgia. It’s all in the past now. At fifty, he finds himself a tortured man, a tired man, more a tortellini than a taco man. This last morsel resists definite sexual content. Food or sex? Indeed, the old two-pronged problematic engendered his fertile ballpoint in the early years. By sixth grade, Roger was the angry young writer par excellence, dishing out guzes and doles of vulgar Pop-Tartery, layer cake glued with cheesy verbiage, often heavily iced with suckatash smut. The stuff of which famous literary agents are made, in words, epaule de dogfood. A fool for pastry coincidence, he cut many a young rhyme in the school cafeteria. Neatly sandwiched between the hot dinners and the cold deli, he spied on the world, waxing loquacious over its steamy beefs, jerky adolescents, both gawky teen girls and geeky boys. For love of verse, he spurned the occasional heraldry of paper-triangle football or three-penny table hockey. His first poem, perhaps premonitory of future interest or investment, rented limerick form, with a couplet addendum, for a no-nonsense theme.

~~ from Spark Park: A Tale in Two Parts