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This poem comes in pencil only

This guy popped out of nowhere after 30 or so years just when I needed him most.

pencial sharpener antique 1980s

He looks like a dapper old cat, but what you can’t see … what he’s hiding behind his back … is his secret weapon.

And exactly what I need right now.

A pencil sharpener.

It’s hard to explain exactly why I found him where I did (inside a personalized pink plastic container holding personalized pink hair ribbons), but I’m not one to question serendipity (okay, I am.)

It just so happens that I’ve been desperate for a good pencil sharpener lately.

If I had my choice, I’d get a vintage one from a 1950s midwestern schoolhouse and hammer it into my kitchen wall — BANG BANG BANG — but those guys seem to be going for big bucks on ebay and anyway I need mine to be the travelin’ type.

And this dandy cat looks ripe for travelin’, don’t you think?

He needs to fit in my handbag, the one holding a heavy spiral bound notebook with a hard cover decorated in mandalas.

I’m writing more by hand these days, you see.  Not because I want to. (Frankly, I prefer the feel of a circa 2005 keyboard against my rapidly tap tap tapping fingers. I also covet the ability to quickly delete the last thought I just had. See? I just deleted a thought you will never know.)

But because  I’ve accidentally become a poet: a compulsive stringer together of words. And poets (potentially the most compulsive artists of all) need at their side a means to satisfy their urges.

A computer won’t do. One needs to get down words with haste.

A smartphone won’t either. My thumbs are too thick, too clumsy. “Bogus” accidentally becomes “booger.”

If only I had a secretary by my side. … the cat would surely do if only he was alive.

“Please, kind sir, take down this line,” I might say to the cat if only he could lift his  hand away from his orange man purse and take dictation. “No, strike that! Change compulsive to inveterate.”

Sexy Quiet

What if I made the choice and the choice was Quiet? It’s true sometimes Noise tricks me into believing he is life. What with all the…

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