A perspective on slam poetry

Meep Meep goes the darkness.
Or so it seems, as the roadrunner races across pulsating asphalt,
Enigmatic as the desert sands, he will not be caught, will not be caged,
But is he already, by the immutable walls of reality,
By a culture, extending its salty, greasy, hungry capitalist hands towards vulnerable nature;
By the choking embrace of network television;
By millions of young, relentless eyes, once boring him, transfixing him into a brightly colored screen, demanding more appearances, roaring for the risk of yet another elaborate, deadly trap.
Now they look elsewhere.
Surely this animal, this fictitious being to whom we ascribe our own filthy mannerisms of trickery, guile, wit, insolence, hubris will never rest at peace with his brethren, will never again feel the sole scraps of attention we would afford him, buried deep beneath a seething tide of gory fascination.
For we marked him, marked him irrevocably with our disease, and in so doing left that solitary Meeper astride of two incompatible ways of life, Nature and our strip-mall Hell, questioning his place in either, finding love in none.
Meep Meep goes the darkness.

Frank

/ / /

I was bored around 11:30 this evening so I sketched out and wrote the first part of a three-segmented short story. This is yet to be edited, but will likely see love soon. I hope you enjoy.

/ / /

Frank

Frank was an oddly dissatisfied man. He worked in a home services shop, smiling, directing customers, and generally facilitating the sale of wares for his employing corporate chain. More particularly his job involved the construction department. There, Frank would ensure that the entire medley of nuts, bolts, lumber, tools, and other building supplies were in proper order, and that the patrons of that section were sufficiently informed and primed to purchase goods. What killed Frank about this was not the lack of room for advancement, or the long hours spent on his feet, or even those demanding and seemingly obnoxious consumers, spittle flying from their jaws as they requested immediate data on the location of widgets, Frank in fact rather enjoyed the challenge of dealing with those odious persons. No, what made Frank perish a little the more every evening was inventorying.

You see, every night Frank's employer wished for each piece of merchandise to rest in its proper place. This would to a casual listener sound reasonable, but due to the nature of Franks work was in fact rather soul crushing. In one aisle, aisle seven, the aisle where nails and screws were kept, there were nearly a thousand individual cubbies housing every manner of possible shape, size, and orientation of fastening devices. Customers would often pour over these, selecting a healthy dozen which closely resembled what they desired, and on finding the correct bolt, dump the remainder in the nearest convenient tray. In one day Frank's section would see hundreds of customers, nearly a third of them dumping merchandise. As they did so, somewhere, Frank cried on the inside, for his lot was to correct their careless sloth before going home in the evening.

This entailed slowly digging through the stretching gray sea of nearly identical parts in aisle seven, detecting those out of place objects, and diligently returning them to their correct positions. For that one problematic lane alone, the process could take anywhere from minutes to several hours. It took hours more often than not. On finishing aisle seven, which he always did first simply because he could not bear the thought of doing it once weary from the rest of his nightly clean-up, he would proceed to sort the rest of his sovereign lanes of product, ranging aisles one-six to nine-eleven. Frank felt like Sisyphus, but with none of the tragic glory.

Sometimes his manager chanced by in the mornings, smiling hollowly at Frank after checking, just to be sure, that there were no size fifteen bolts in the place dedicated to those of fourteen. More rarely, he would find that Frank had missed some small detail. On these occasions Frank would later be called into the back office and reminded that dozens of young and eager boys were looking for work in these times, and if Frank were to continue to fail in his duties, another individual with “more initiative” could readily take his place. During the day, certain customers did that unforgivable deed, unsorting Frank's wares, but in plain view of the worn salesmen, some even looking him directly in the eyes as they condemned him to another late evening, and a delayed return to his lonely apartment existence, punctuated only by the soft flashing glow of his comforting television.

This was the life of Frank mid afternoon to deep, deep evening five days a week. He rose long after the sun, ate a sparse breakfast of oatmeal or commercially packed noodles, donned one of five sets of worn, but nonetheless well-washed company clothes, and trundled off to work on the bus again. Frank did have vacation time and weekends, as per federal mandates, but having nothing better to do and no-one better to do better things with than his black and gray calico, Samuel tended to spend these reprieves as he spent his earlier evenings, numbing the hours with his old television set, forgetting all sense of location and even of time. In short, Frank's routine was as constant as it was boring as it was disheartening.

That was of course until, as you the reader should surely expect from such a story, for what kind of a storyteller writes only of humdrummings and dullery, Frank's destiny took a decided turn towards the bizarre.

On a day like any other, seven hours into Frank's shift and approaching closing time, Frank had been carefully monitoring aisle seven, even preemptively sorting the screws and nails that shoppers displaced, in order to assure himself at least one evening of early retirement. The birdlike murmur of spring couples shopping for minor embellishments to their home had quieted, and all that remained was a few snippets of conversation and the trundling clatter of several laden shopping carts traveling about his department. Frank was at the moment considering in extreme detail a crack running through the bare marble floor of aisle seven. It spanned one side of the aisle to the other, and from it ran dozens of smaller fractures in the store's walking surface. The cracks were just small enough to be trod over without recognition by the masses of shoppers who passed them, but having nothing better to do on those evenings like this one where Frank preemptively handled closing-time duties, Frank had recently taken to noticing such things. He thought the cracks must be somehow indicative of his current state; once he had dreamed of much more than a stone floors and angry customers. He couldn't quite frame the metaphor, but what of the screws, surely they must somehow...

Franks reverie was broken by the shuffle of feet further along the floor in aisle seven. Bad news. He looked up and saw a peculiarly dressed man. The person stood just below Franks average height, had a clever look about him, a welcoming, confident smile strangely offset by his darting eyes, and was garbed in a neatly pressed suit. This was so peculiar, as Frank hardly ever saw moderately well dressed individuals in his section, where only small numbers of any one good were sold. Certainly businessmen frequented the offices of his branch, and sometimes the proprietors of smaller firms would come to the back where order pickups were made, but hardly ever would the well dressed find their way into his aisles. More pressingly, the man held an empty bag and was eying the products of aisle seven.

Almost as if by random, this stranger's hands brushed over the boxes of goods arrayed in front of Frank, stopping suddenly to take loose pinches of items and deposit them in his bag. This resulted in a potpourri of steel, iron, and aluminum parts that made Frank's gut turn barrel rolls. The stranger continued, filling his bag to the brim, until he reached Frank, looked deliberately at him, and slowly moved to upend his bag into a single stall. Shuddering at the horrendous game of 52 card pickup that this would surely mandate of him, Frank took an involuntary tick forwards as his distress became evident in minute facial horror.

Surprising Frank, the man stopped his up-heaving motion without having spilled a single nail, and never breaking eye contact, laughed.

He ended the silence with a precise yet comforting drawl: “You don't know me, but in a sense I know you, and you'd probably like to hear me out.”