Roleplaying Poetry

No, no, no. It’s not roleplaying as in Dungeons & Dragons. What I MEAN is that in the following poem, I assumed a personae that wasn’t me and played it for effect. Kind of like how I pretended to be a fireman in the poem ‘Stan‘ (the rest of ‘Stan’ is pretty much true). What can I say? My life isn’t very dangerous, or even necessarily interesting. But as I’ve noted on several occasions, I have on hell of an imagination….

When I had kids, a lot of my poetry shifted - became about them, about fatherhood, about responsibility, and to a certain extent, about a newly found, inherent fear that I discovered.

This poem plays out one of those fears. This is my imagination at work, horrifying me. The poem appeared in 2007 in the online e-zine, Subtletea.com, edited by Mr. David Herrle.

Fear In A Handful of Cookie Crumbs

I watch Sesame Street
My eyes take in all the happy monsters
Elmo squeals, Cookie gobbles
And Grover does his little, goofy dance
A blur of blues and reds and yellows
Scintillating harmlessly on the screen

Monsters, they’re called
But I know better

I know that monsters really look like us
Exactly like us
I know that monsters aren’t happy
Unless we’re not
And that the only color that monsters really know is red

And I know

That a monster
Is the reason
I watch Sesame Street alone