A few days ago, I found a folder full of poems and stories I’d written 10 or 12 years ago, before I had weblogs and newspapers and comic strips to satisfy my creative jones. The stories were all two- or three-page fragments that had some potential but never got off the ground. The poems were fairly boring exercises in language.

Still, it was a lot of fun to read. I’m pretty certain that I never showed any of this stuff to anyone. I barely remember writing it, except for one story fragment about an elaborately entangled pair of non-friends. I remember thinking about that one a lot.

I’m still not going to share most of it with anyone, because it’s either just works in progress or else of interest to no one but me. But I will share the following prose poem, which made me smile. I don’t remember writing it at all.

Beige

A man walks out of his house all decked out in beige. Beige shirt, hat, jacket, trousers, hair, and eyes. Hops into his little beige car and zips off to his little beige job where he’ll sip a steaming cup of beige java, flip some paperwork in front of himself and sigh in delight. Meets some buddies for lunch, beige boys just like him, they slip on down to the Beige Room or, no, maybe today he’s just beige-baggin’ it. Before long, he returns to that little beige home, (Did I mention it was beige?) where his beige little wife gives him a beige little peck on his beige little cheek. And after serving him up a plateful of beige, she slowly squeezes into a hot little beige number, tears back the beige comforter from their little beige bed and mounts him like he’s a beige stallion, screaming, “Fuck me, beige boy! Fuck me ’til I’m brown!”