Micro Monday - August 19, 2024

Wergle Flomp Edition

The 2024 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry contest just wrapped up last week. Not being a poet, I didn’t expect to win, but I never expect to win the lottery either, and I still feel oddly disappointed when I don’t.

This was my entry, for posterity:

Untitled

"Hot damn, is that a free bagel!"
The crowd parts - how could we not?
No one willing to wait in a line could ever match
such violent need.
He shoulders forth and squares himself in front of the tray.
The bagel stares back up at him:
suspiciously solitary,
imperfect and irregular,
the words "DAY OLD" above it like an insincere apology.

Were there other bagels before this one?
Other men to claim them?
We dare not guess;
it’s safer to look away.
The scene is too intimate to bear
the weight of our collective gaze.

But for those who peek -
the brave few who watch the reverent hand
lift the past into the loving present -
they find themselves believing that,
yes,
there is such a thing as fate.

For the record, I didn’t mean for this one to be Untitled, but the contest form didn’t have Title as a required field and I forgot to go back and fill it out, which would’ve been a really funny story to tell on the press tour, actually.