The Pitch by Dan LinnI knew this guy who was addicted to his failure.
Get this, he had an eye surgically removed so
he could replace it with a video camera and transmitter
and then video blog himself singing to his failure,
taking it to dinner, and getting in drunken screaming arguments with it.
He continued to show up to work just to be close to it.
Like a stubborn toddler testing his parents patience,
he kept doing that thing he knew would make them say "no",
again "no", and “no”, and “no”, and “no”, and “no”, and still again, "no"
until some sudden corporate corporal punishment re-enforced his pain.
Comrades picked up his discarded opportunities
and passed him in the parking lane
taking "cuts" in line in front of him over and over and over.
He threatened to perform ritual seppuku over every new email insult,
begged for summary execution,
and constantly revised the terms of his surrender for anyone who would listen.
He burned an effigy of his ambition and
then nail-gunned it to a cross on a cork board at his desk.
He wrote martyrdom romances like the stories of the saints
he used as a child for auto-erotic fantasies. .
He loved his failure so much .
he built a wind up doll of office supplies and a pencil sharpener
and took it to bed. .
He wrote long rambling love letters to it in a dead language.
He couldn't make even one woman, one mother, one nun happy,
so he philandered with exotic failures.
thinking that one might make bring him to a new level of passionate despair.
Then, sobbing his regrets, he slunk back,
professing reform that no one really wanted.
He took his failure to the seedy part of town,
falling prey to all manner of disturbing perversion,
seeking more and more spectacular heights of failure.
He stood naked, feet bleeding, in the massive city dump of his evidence,
shouting out his URL for friends to view his failure
starring in MPEGs on his webpage.
A group of righteous citizens got an injunction against him
in protest over his parading his failure around
when their's were so much more achingly poignant.
He wrote an opera about his impotence, a ballet about his disabilities,
and a War and Peace about his tragic history.
He took all possibilities to court and
argued for their hopelessness in front of cynical judges
who, by law, had to agree to award him a stalemate prison term.
From a cell of his own construction,
he carved his failure's many initials in his skin.
Now there's reality TV
someone, like me, could believe. 03/22/2010 Author's Note: This is an edit for line breaks by a friend. I was written like a run on sentence. This may be easier to see.
Posted on 11/09/2011 Copyright © 2025 Dan Linn
Member Comments on this Poem |
Posted by LK Barrett on 11/19/11 at 04:37 AM ...heartbreaking, breathtaking, hauntingly familiar and faintly sinister...don't think you could ask for more...adore. ty for the write, Mr. Linn...lk |
Posted by Frankie Sanchez on 11/20/11 at 01:38 AM wow. i admire this. there are many great moments in here. |
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