Prose Poem: Ready to be myself.

 

At long last, I am ready to be myself.

For the first seventeen years of my life

I played the part of a waif.

Even though I had good parents,

plenty to eat, and

a nice big house 

with a huge backyard.

I sat on curbs near bridges

over the river in the downtown

section of a Midwestern city,

making wistful eyes at

passersby.

Some gave me money.

Some gave me used clothing.

Some gave me candy.

All of which I threw in the river.

When I turned eighteen

I became a genius.

I got a scholarship to Harvard.

Where I smoked a pipe

and constructed complex

algorithms.

I shunned the girls

and schmoozed the professors.

And became the youngest tenured

faculty member in history.

At twenty-five I grew weary of the

academic rat race,

so I stowed away on a 

schooner headed for the

South China Sea.

My mistake.

It was only a ride at Diseneyland.

So I sold popcorn from a bright red

wagon on Main Street.

Until I got caught eating the popcorn.

Then it was Sing Sing.

A hardened recidivist,

I crashed out of the joint

several times

but was always caught

and thrown into solitary.

Where I bounced a rubber ball

endlessly against the damp wall,

and composed a reply to Oscar Wilde's

'De Profundis.'

Which got me an early parole.

But none of those roles were me.

At heart, I'm just a swineherd.

Watching over my Lincolnshire Curly Coats 

as they snuffle for mast in the autumn leaves.

That's what I thought I wanted.

But never achieved.

Instead, I was caught up 

in the mad whirl of 

North Dakota's literary scene

during the 1990's.

I married the governor's daughter,

then went completely vegan.

When the dust settled,

I was on my own in Thailand.

Unfriended, unknown, and undernourished.

A tribe of Huguenots took me in

and made me their mascot.

But that was only to fatten me up

for a sacrifice to their volcano god --

Mugwump.

I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

Stayed with an aunt in New Jersey.

And suddenly grew old and mossy 

and smelly.

That's when the pigs started following

me around.

Now I live in a cabin on a pond

next to the railroad tracks,

where I butcher the pigs that

seek me out, so I can feed

itinerant hoboes on their way

to the wildfires out West.

It's who I really truly am:

A murderous carnivore

who battens off the miseries

of the lumpenproletariat.