Confession Tuesday - April Fool's Style

Dear reader, I have no idea how long it's been since my last confession but I've got a lot of sin to share so let's go, I've got a job to get to.



1) I really dislike poetry. Really. Sometimes I go nutso with all the images and that odd spacing. It's like trying to read a roadsign while I'm driving, I get some of it, but mostly, I'm just speeding along trying to get my destination. I find the whole process of "digesting" a poem irritating. And rather rude. Poems should not be eaten. It's just wrong.


2) I confess I slept through another poetry reading. Honestly, how can one not? The shuffling of papers, the hemming and hawing, it's worse than watching paint dry because paint is pretty and doesn't talk in that weird poetry voice. Why the poetry voice?

And at the end of a poem there's that audience sigh, I think it's a courtesy breath to show they are still alive and awake. I apologize for my snoring, for the way I twitched and fell off my chair. Poet, I was dreaming someone was feeding you a dictionary of better words, I swear it.

3) I confess I only go to poetry events to meet hot poet boys. You know the ones, with their black turtlenecks, with their unshowered bods. I love how they say "like" when they introduce their poems-- "Like, I wrote this after I fell in the shower and like I was really thinking about how like the blood from my forehead really sort of looked like one of those like really creepy scenes in a movie where the blood actually runs over the camera lens, but like, this time, it was really my eyeball. I like to call this poem "Father, May I Die."

4) I confess when a poet asks "Do you want me to read two more poems?" my usual response is "No, I want a snack." If you have to ask, then the answer is no. Either read two more without our permission or stop reading. I'm not your mom or your personal secretary here to organize your poems. If you want to read two more, read two more. But don't ask me, I'm mostly likely asleep anyway and your words disrupt my dream about poets in black turtlenecks falling in the shower.

Two poems is a commitment anyway. You'd be better asking "Do you want me to read two short poems?" I mean, what if poem #1 was The Waste Land?

5) Speaking of the Waste Land, I only memorized it so I would have something interesting to say at parties, my friends would think I'm smarter than them, and my parents wouldn't feel entirely robbed that I became an English major instead of majoring in Finance.


6) And if you have to know, my favorite poet is Homer (Simpson). Doh!