man in the mirror ( a short story poem)

[saw]

all the shrinks were broken records,
Stevie you need to keep a journal !

but Stevie had mastered bullheadedness
so when it came to taking advice from
obvious imbeciles, he wasn't about to start
pussyfooting around with no pens and pencils
he was a man for god's sake, a Real man

a man of action, diaries were for teenage girls
and fags, but he did know in the back of his mind
if you wanted to know who had the best cup of coffee
in town you were going to have to drink a little mud

and since the School of Cruel Kicks in the Balls
wasn't really paying any dividends either, while he
was paying for his lottery ticket and his Skoal,
he said softly to the storekeeper, Give me
one of them Big Chief yellow lined pads there, Maxine

Stevie kicked back in his greasy blue Naugahyde recliner
sipping on his Miller Lite, ...Ahhh, that's what I'm talkin'
about, the Champagne of Fucking Bottled Beer !
He stared at the writing tablet lying there in the same place
of honor as his remote control and the TV Guide,

and he began to talk to the pad like an unwanted house guest
How the hell you think you're gonna help me ? ...the pad didn't
answer, and in a rattlesnake quick strike of anger he snatched
the tablet, raised it high above his head and screamed, FINE !

he thought back to that consortium of quackery that the bullshit
judge had ordered him to see, Dr. Whack and friends remembering
their crapola mantra,....writing won't do you a bit of good unless
you are honest, Stevie..............he decided to lie
he wrote about a fictional character which he embellished

incrementally every day for exactly one year whereupon he threw
365 filled pads onto the living room floor, jammed his Bic into
the sheetrock and SCREAMED, I still can't see a goddamned thing !
This was a big fucking waste of time !......Stevie was dead wrong,
............he had already become the man he loved to write about.

[joel]

How the hell you think you're gonna help me ? ...he
SCREAMED
............he had already become the man he loved to write about.

The audience was angered he
called fiction his biography—
the author but smiled:
he'd fathered a child,
his truest self, in poetry.

[Kailashana]

This is really one good short-story poem, enviable as a matter of fact; however, like a rear-view mirror, ymmv.



~A