[PoemADay] No. 4

I realized recently that I completely suck at writing a poem-a-day. I'm already in debt for three poems as it's already the 7th and I only just wrote a fourth poem. I'm kind of in awe of my 17-year-old self who could toss out lines like nobody's business (of course that facility might have been predicated on dressing in black and reading Camus, smoking clove cigarettes and drinking vermouth - to steal from Stephin Merritt).

No. 4 [Adam's Party]

How easy your scorn

sibilant and quick off the tongue

a serpent's quiver

slippery and quiet:

apples and breasts

and sin

And at this party of Adam's

after dogs and cattle and sows -

an afterthought

after thoughts of lying with beasts

(perhaps attempted and rebuffed)

his final and greatest creation (fiction?)

a single rib

for a scapegoat

5/6/10

This was inspired by this strange guy I've seen on the Downtown 2,3 a couple of times. Surrounded by plastic bags and weighted down by a thousand pins. He always reiterates the same sing-song tune: "Adam had a party, Adam had a party..." with the precision of a music box. I usually ignore people on the train, but I was perturbed by his memorized rhetoric. Obviously Victoria's Secret's being usurped by an Apple store was highly symbolic. Of course all that symbolism to this strange man was distilled down to the fact that women are the root of all evil.

And I thought, "What a terrible deal. All the blame for a single rib."

And thus my poem.