“Listen, snowflake,
It doesn’t matter that everyone
Looks different,
Only that everyone looks different-
ly.”—
And that’s what he wrote,
Dangling contentedly across his bed,
Entangled by the stifling wisteria of
The sheets; that’s what he wrote,
In that rough, big-shouldered tenor of the city,
Where he drifted, a poet
In a Spartan’s world; he had to speak with
Force; he had to grunt.
And his sole aim in life was to grunt with a florid splendor,
An ineffable beauty of emotive self-expression;
He lived life as a writer, a poet,
And so (it goes),
Lived life as one of many
Of the most honest liars to ever breathe
On God’s creation.
“Listen, snowflake,” he wrote.
“You absolute doll,
There’s a hell of a lot of commotion
Right now
About you and about me,
And I just want to tell you—“
And he set down his pen,
Leaned sullenly into the cool of his escritoire,
And shook his head:
He had nothing to tell her.
A naturally occurring tragedy of nature
Naturally occurred, naturally,
So he decided he would volunteer in and travel
To the romantic South,
Faulkner’s South, Twain’s South,
The land of milk and honey,
And Huey P. Long;
There he would leap from helicopters
Into defunct buildings,
Pull a helpless mother into his grasp,
And rush her to safety,
And there would be one thousand of those mothers,
All of them impossibly indebted, and
In reply to their saying so
He would smile proudly and say,
“You are an amazing woman,
The most vibrant flame upon which
I have ever set my eyes;
Your soul is the morning breeze
On the crest of pastoral mountains—
Do not thank me—
Let it fly,”
And smiling proudly
He would tell this to all of them,
Smiling proudly.
He would then return home,
Sit at his escritoire, and
Have something to tell her.
He got stuck in Baton Rouge.
“Look, where we really need people like you,
Selfless volunteers, is
The assembly center; there we
Have a field hospital set up;
We need people like you,
Selfless volunteers
To help out with the triage.”
. . . “Take this marker and
Mark their foreheads if they’re
No good for bothering with,
These people.”
The poet looked down
At the marker and saw
That it was red, like
Lamb’s blood,
And then he went through
The assembly center,
Marking their foreheads if they were
No good for bothering with,
These people,
He saw someone,
A helpless mother choking on
Her own blood as it
Gathered in her gullet, and
He stooped over, arm trembling,
To her forehead,
And kissed it,
The tip of the marker, that is,
To her forehead.
He did this one
Thousand
Times,
Until finally he drew the mark
On his own forehead.
A doctor saw him, frowned,
And said,
“Listen, snowflake,
This is a tough job,
And, frankly,
It looks like you’re losing it
So go home.”
At home he sat at his escritoire,
And after the one thousand mothers
And Faulkner’s South,
Remained speechless.
“Listen, snowflake,” he wrote.
“You absolute doll,
There’s a hell of a lot of commotion
Right now
About you and about me,
And I just want to tell you,
Don’t ever fucking dream big.”
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Originally Posted by Harry Haller
