A Confused Soul Writes His First Poem | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: A Confused Soul Writes His First Poem | Previous Challenge Entry
By matthew buchanan
08/21/07
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A Confused Soul Writes His First Poem

I was sitting in my favorite little café, enjoying an iced tea and an onion bagel with cream cheese, when the man shuffled through the door. I hadn’t seen him before. The man deposited his mackintosh on the floor, said something I couldn’t hear to the person at the counter, and approached my table. Now I knew that the Heavenly Grounds Café was not one of those places where strangers just start talking to each other. I had been here every day for three years without ever speaking to a soul. It wasn’t that I was unfriendly. I was a friendly person. But I relished the role of the crazy man in the attic, the reclusive artist who didn’t have time for chitchat because he was off composing the next great literary masterpiece.
The secret was to nod your head as people came in, then to scribble furiously as if the idea just conceived was so transitory that it would sprout wings and fly right through the café ceiling and out into the crystalline blue sky if you didn’t write it down right now.
I hadn’t composed a single line since I had been in the café. Not one single line. But nobody had to know that I was writing down random conversations without trying to add rhyme or reason to them. When it rains it means something’s bad going to happen in my life, so you might want to back up. I’m sorry, it’s just not working out, it’s not you, it’s me. I think it’s time we let Susie have a goldfish.
The man, who had an ice water in his left hand and who wore disconcertingly thick glasses that seemed to take up half his face, coughed. “It’s not polite to stare, without at least saying hello” he said.
I said, “I’m sorry—I come here to write.”
He said, “So—what’ve you written?”
“Excuse me?”
“What’ve you written so far?”
I flipped through the notebook. “Notes, quotes, observations, and deep thoughts.”
“So,” said the man, “you haven’t written anything.”
“I have too.”
“Who do you think you’re fooling?”
“I’ll have you know that Mark Twain wrote in journals. Observation is the key to good writing.”
“He also furnished his own thoughts instead of sponging the words from every single person who happened to walk into the room.”
I paused, and then looked at the man. He was unsettlingly familiar. “Do I know you?” he said.
“You,” he said, “can call me Homer.”
“That cannot be your first name,” I said. I looked around the café. The normal buzz. Did anyone else find this stranger as unsettling as I did at the moment? Was anybody else even remotely concerned that a stranger with large glasses and a major attitude was sitting here harassing the Heavenly Grounds best customer?
The man looked at me—again. I like the tiger in that small cage in the zoo who never stopped pacing—like the man was reading my mind. I repeated myself. “Homer,” I said, “cannot be your real name.”
“Very good,” said the stranger. “You’re quite the detective. I made it up. It’s an invented name.”
“Why would you do that with a person you’ve just met?”
“My friend,” he said, “It is fiction. You should try it. Don’t let all the truths you observe run together into some big mishmash of unrelated nonsense. Dadaism was amusing at the time, but does not translate into prose.”
The man then stood up to leave.
I’d like to say that music from the Hallelujah chorus started playing, that I freed the Willy of my imagination and entered the zone of literature that Dickens must’ve known while writing Oliver Twist, that Fitzgerald must’ve been in during the composition of Great Gatsby, that my brain freed from its malaise wrote the masterpiece that I was born to write. I’d like to say that the stranger came back into the café a year later to congratulate me on becoming what he knew all along that I’d become.
But that wasn’t what happened—not exactly. The man picked his mackintosh off the floor and walked out the door. The bell on the door jingled loudly.
And I picked up my pen and wrote in my journal: Ringing doorbell ushers in the new day, One man who calls himself Homer up and walks away. The End. My first original poem.

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