My uncle died and left me a whole warehouse full of canned goods.
Canned pickled beets. Canned succotash. Corned beef hash. Green beans. Water chestnuts. Sardines. Peaches. Diced tomatoes. Bully beef. Peas. Creamed corn. Golden syrup. Horse mackerel. And so on.
All of it good until the year 2023.
So I decided to make stews and casseroles with it all to feed starving poets.
I got a camp stove and began heating up pots of beef stew and blended cans of diced tomatoes for gazpacho and put up a sign in front of the warehouse (which, I forgot to mention, I also inherited from my uncle) that read: "FREE EATS FOR STARVING POETS."
My reason for doing this was quite cynical.
I wanted to prove that there are no starving poets around. It's a myth.
They are all fat cats with cushy teaching jobs at universities, not emaciated artists like Knut Hamsun once wrote about.
They wouldn't show up to eat my sodium, sugar, and msg-loaded meals for all the tea in China. Not them highbrows!
(I love everybody, really, except phonies -- and there are a lot of them around.)
Nobody came the first day I did this. So I gave the food I had prepared to a group of telemarketers who worked in the next building over. They were selling time shares to condos in Hawaii.
I guess one of them knew somebody at some TV station or something, since the next day I was swamped with reporters.
By then I had installed a large oven and was baking green bean casseroles and stirring pots of slumgullion.
I told them exactly what I was doing -- offering free meals to writers of verse. No strings attached. Eat all you want. Never a cover charge.
Well, this got on the evening news and went viral.
And suddenly the shabby, timid, woebegone people started to trickle in.
I didn't ask them to prove they were poets. They didn't have to recite or show me their awards or degrees in English Lit. I just fed them. I figured if someone wants to call themselves a poet they have every right in the world to do so, and who's to argue it with them?
And none of them looked like prosperous and sleek university teachers, either. They all looked like a falling snowflake would knock them down for the count.
After about a week I was visited by a real gen-yew-wine professor of poetry from a nearby university. He was the real McCoy alright; he wore a black flowing cape and had a pair of pince nez pinching his nose.
"What can I do for you, bub?" I asked him, not at all kindly.
"I just received a twenty-thousand dollar grant to write about your fantastic enterprise, in iambic pentameter. I am here to observe your operations, in situ."
"Over my dead body" I told him, rolling up my sleeves.
When I gave him the bum's rush out the warehouse door the crowd of tattered men and women who were eating my tuna casserole gave a cheer.
I turned to face them, after wiping off my hands, and had to ask:
"Are any of you really writing poetry of any kind, or do you just come here for a free meal?"
A guy who looked like John Qualen came up to me, cap in hand, and said "We all have poetry in our souls, mister. Does that count?"
"Only in Harlequin novels" I replied. "Only in Hallmark Specials. But don't worry, pal -- let's open up some cans of three bean salad for good measure -- whaddya say?"
So I kept feeding these humble folk until all the canned goods were gone. Then I sold the warehouse for a tidy sum.
It turned out to be a good tax write off.
