The Peril of Ancient File Folders

As part of the annual mid-summer "we gotta
get rid of some of this crap” campaign by the love of my life, I cleaned out my office. While going through my file cabinet, which has probably lingered untouched for the best part of twenty years, I found all kinds of interesting/nostalgic/embarrassing stuff. Back in the day that I believed I’d be the next John Steinbeck (Or at least Freddy Steinbeck his less talented cousin), I wrote all manner of literature/ noodling/inane drivel.

Here’s one such for your appraisal/scrutiny/testing of your gag reflex. It’s instructive of what happens when you combine a bored writer, a word processor and an abundance of free time.

I sat down to write an epic poem

You know the kind, something Beowulfesque and

Gilgameshic, an adventure odder than the odyssey and

Iller than the Illiad, a tale filled with grandeur and

pathos on a glorious scale, preferably featuring

Vikings storming a Norman castle, flinging

explosive clumps of pyrotechnic peat moss over

moat encircled stone walls. Think “The Song of Roland”

being lip synched by a cover band.

“Ayeeeeee!!! I’m on fire!!!!” the cry would fly from the circling serfs and

pandemonious peons whose faux pas was zigging

when they should have been zagging. “Ayeeeee!!!”

Or, perhaps the saga could chronicle the exploits of a

sleek-cheeked Nubian princess, gyrating a voluptuous hootchie-coo and

curling her finger to summon a drooling sheik and as he

zooms in like a moth to a flame neatly plunging a dagger into his heaving breast, payback for an earlier transgression like failing to leave

a sufficient tip or calling her “babe!”

So, I prepared. Made time to rhyme, stacking up reams of clean white paper and laying out cups of bitter dark coffee and my trusty thesaurus; I set out

accompanied by Miriam Webster, the Sancho

Panza to my impossible literary dream-seeking Donny Quixote.

Infused by my muse and

Inspired by my aspirations I

Squeezed my eyes tightly closed

Vowing to not reopen them until my

masterpiece appeared, fully realized

on the screen. My fingers lingered over the keys as I

let the words flutter out of my brain like

so many frenzied birds escaping a just opened cage.

An hour passed and then two which spiraled into a third.

Fulfilling my promise to myself, I dared not peek and

behold the molten metaphors and throbbing narrative that

flowed like red hot lava from the Vesuvius of my

roiling mind. The clatter of keys and the drumbeat of the

vast armies I’d created joined the siren song of a

galaxy of nymphs and the grunts and roars of the

strange and wonderful creatures becoming

the soundtrack to my fever dream philosophizing.

In a flurry I combined iambic whatever-ameter with

great swoops of onomatopoeia, tongue tantalizing

alliteration and certainly a healthy dose of symbolic

polygamy spiced with a dash of lateral lyricism.

Nouns, verbs, past and present participles and malodorous

modifiers were flung from my fingertips onto

the waiting pages of the virgin Word document,

a future classic destined to be required reading for

a platoon of semi-snoozing high school sophomores.

Finally, as the morning sun beamed through my

office window I applied the thundering climax to my

magnum Opie, the fruit of my all-night encounter with

the divine and mischievous. I detected a sound at my elbow and opened my

eyes to the sight of my worldly muse examining

my sprawling masterpiece, my piece de something, something. (Hey, I was exhausted, I’d emptied the tank of my voluminous vocabulary).

“Very nice” my wife crooned and smiled and patted the top

Of my still humming head. “But, think how much more smoothly it might have

read, had you started with your index fingers over the F and J instead of the G and H.