Prose Poem: I wandered down a sandy road

 

I wander down a sandy road

while my heart is riven with doubt.

The sunlight seems to shun me.

The shadows smirk at me.

A small green lizard eyes me warily,

and then lays several brown eggs

on a rock --

mocking my sterile condition.

I can never lay an egg,

can never create something,

anything,

worth a second glance.

I know this because I wrote

a poem and mailed it to a

world famous magazine.

Then waited,

shivering like a leaf

caught in a spider web.

Their response arrived six months later.

It was bordered in black.

It came C.O.D.

There was a skull and crossbones on

the back of it.

It read:

"Dire Sir:  Your submission 

ranks as the most asinine and

discouraging piece of literary

twaddle in the sad sad annals

of misbegotten poetry.

It is so bad that we burned it

and then sealed the ashes in an urn

and sent it to

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository

for permanent burial.

If you ever try to write poetry again

we will see to it that your fingers 

are run through a lawn mower."

So I wander down this sandy road,

and think to myself that I will use my

stimulus check to buy a commission

in the Swiss Navy, and sail away to the

Matterhorn Islands forever and a day.