i’m asking for a friend,
but you don’t know them
so please don’t ask,
though maybe you could, i don’t know,
in fact, lemme tell you so we can skip
the rest of this rigmarole,
and get on with our day,
but i gotta warn ya, you’re not going to know this friend,
you know, the friend for whom i’m asking,
though if you do know them, maybe don’t go around tellin’
capeesh!
do you think the other customers of home depot will notice that i forgot to put on deodorant before
going to the store to buy a new door knob because a guest
that both my wife and i were unfamiliar with decided to open
our front door a bit too aggressively
and broke the inner bolt where the key supposedly locks us inside our house
with nothing to do but spend countless nights romanticizing our present for the future,
or do you think the other customers won’t care about my body odor,
because perhaps they’re more concerned by the fact that i had a car accident
before arriving at home depot and part of my body,
a significant part, more than i care to discuss here,
is covered in blood and bruises and i’m slowly dying in the plumbing aisle
while a scissor lift cordoned off the store from witnessing my death crawling all over their products
as someone that considers themselves a poet,
i sometimes ask whether the world needs
any of my poems,
to which i suppose need is too strong of a word,
considering how much poetry existed before i was
ever conceived by minds and hands of masters
long deceased and overcrowded in the streets of cemeteries,
but then i also have to ask what i would do with my time
if i didn’t spend it writing random poems and stories,
and more than likely i would be scrolling through reddit,
or playing chess or xbox,
or maybe reading a book by or about some dead person,
or, at least at this particular moment while i write this,
i would be roasting coffee for some stranger on the internet,
all of which i do, i swear,
but sometimes i write poems in between these random assortment
of activities because…
i can, because…i like to,
despite knowing that the world would go on,
people would go on,
with or without my limited contribution of poems assembled
haphazardly on the internet,
curated by myself for a few fellow lonely
cybertravelers wondering and wandering,
spinning happily in arbitrary directions,
in one quick breath caught by the vulture’s wing,
and then gone…
Fred Aiken Writing 