"Oh My Darling, Darling, Doe-eyed Dental Hygenist."

"Dear Movie Hut Employee #62."

Poem

By C.L. Bledsoe

   
Your wife is constantly complaining about how stupid you both are, about how you never do anything significant, how you're wasting your lives, so she drags you to a poetry reading. She heard about it from a coworker, whom you're supposed to meet there, but she doesn't show. You want to leave, but your wife has a look in her eyes of such sadness and disappointment that you think she may leave you; you remember discovering her crying in the bathroom weeks ago, unprompted and inconsolable, and so you stay.
   
The poet comes out and tells a story about how when he was a kid, he had this dog - they went everywhere together, they were in love; and everyday, they met the ice cream truck and shared a Popsicle. Which is really disgusting, but it’s supposed to seem endearing because kids do gross stuff like that.
   
But one day he was across the street at a friend’s house, and he didn’t hear the ice cream truck until it was right outside the door. He ran outside, and just as the truck was leaving, he saw his dog on the other side of the street. And the dog ran across to meet him, but the ice cream truck was coming, and neither saw the other, so wham, the dog was run over and died.
   
Then the poet reads this poem about the last time he was in Venice, and how he was with this girl who really didn’t give two fucks for him, but there’s a lot of water in Venice, and it‘s really pretty there, so it was sort of okay. Then he was walking down the street and he saw this guy selling falafel, so he bought one and stood there eating it all by himself. He considered this a perfect moment.
   
And you’re sitting there, thinking that poem didn’t even mention a dog or ice cream or a truck, or any combination of the three. It reminds you of the crap you had to read in college, but with less punctuation. But you were really happy in college because you smoked a lot of pot, and that’s how things are when you smoke a lot of pot; even if nothing makes sense, it doesn’t matter because you’re happy.
   
And you think what a shame it is that you don’t smoke pot anymore. You never meant to get this old, and for the first time in your life, you seriously consider investing in a hair piece. Then you look at your wife, who is sitting beside you with a look of such contentment on her face – like she just ate a really good sandwich. And you think that at least you got lucky with her; at least she didn’t put on a bunch of weight. And then everyone is applauding, and it’s over. You drive home, thinking about the ice cream, the hairpiece, and somehow, you end up having the best sex you’ve had in years. You fall into a deep sleep and forget about all of it.
   
Until, a couple of months later, you’re in an airport with a couple hours’ layover. You wander into a book store and there is a collection of that guy’s poems. All you remember is the sex, and something about ice cream, so you buy it. And as you sit down to read it, it all comes back – the hair piece, the dog, the falafel, and you want to rip the book apart, set it on fire then buy another copy and make that one watch. But it cost $50 because that’s how much things cost in airports. So you shove it in your briefcase and forget about it until you’re unpacking at home; then you stick it on a shelf somewhere.
   
Then you die, and as your daughter is rummaging through your house, she finds the book. It surprises her to find poetry in between your complete run of Field and Stream, from August, 1982 - May, 2004, and Tom Clancy novels, including the re-released collected early stories. She thinks it must be her mother's, but you'd gone through the house yourself after her suicide and boxed all of her things up.
   
She opens the poetry book, thinking she is about to become close to a part of you she never knew existed. But after a couple poems, she realizes this is the worst crap she’s ever read, all about falafel and sad pigeons, and part of her is a little bit less sad that you’re gone. She begins to understand what it must've been like for her mother. It is a weight that will sit with her for many years.
   
And any guilt she had about selling off all of your stuff vanishes like dandruff in the wind. So she sells everything, takes the cash and uses it to pay off her student loans. Some of which, coincidentally enough, she accrued while studying with a certain poet, a writer in residence at her college the one semester she thought she wanted to be writer, before reason won out and she entered a much more fulfilling career path in investment banking.