Bad Friday

Friday morning I hopped out of the shower, popped over to the lavatory counter, flopped my most profound sexual characteristic down and onto a misplaced curling iron, burning the tender center of my-very-being. Thankfully Ms. Careless had left a glass of iced coke, by her torturing implement. I quickly and fully submerged my pain, into the cooled, amber liquid. Friday evening I attended my first and last meeting of the Brazoria County Poetry league. I arrived at the BCPL president’s home by invitation, to hear their guest speaker, a young, professor of literature, from Rice University. He spoke at great length about metaphors. What a metaphor was. How poets used metaphors to improve imagery in poetry. He gave examples of metaphors, and more examples, explaining each one in detail. It was raining damn metaphors. I would have lapsed into a metaphoric coma, if I had not discovered my bourbon glass to be much too small, requiring me to rise, and refill it several times. When Dr. Metaphor finely finished I strolled over to where he was smiling, and announced that he was full of rhetorical trope, and didn’t know anything about real poetry, and he had stepped on a metonymy and it stank the room up. And we poets from the sticks didn’t need a hot-shot from Houston telling us how to write poetry. and the president of the BCPL grabbed my arm, and snatched my glass from my hand, and it still had boozes in it. And he promenaded me to the door, and assured me that I was talent-less, and that drinking myself to death would be my one and only contribution to poetry. He pushed me out of his home, onto his front steps, slammed the door in my face, after suggesting I never attend another meeting of the BCPL. For a moment, I was stunned, then bowing to his authority I hurled on his “Welcome” mat. And Friday morning as I stood in the bathroom cradling my tormented body element with both hands, the Queen of the Bastille entered, demanded to know -What my problem was? I informed her I had no problem, and suggested she drink her damn coke… before the ice melted.