Stray Observations

The weird looking kid stepped up to the microphone. He wore a nice looking suit, ill-fitting, but nice. His tie was too short and part of her shirt was coming untucked near his left hip. He cleared his throat and began confidently. “A poem,” he coughed again into the microphone. “There is a fat, ugly moon in the night sky. A lecherous, bulbous moon. His face is pockmarked and pallid in color. He leers out of the dark, the pitch black sky along with his little buddies. The, um, what do you call ‘em, stars. Uh…” The boy seemed to lose track of what he was doing. His eyes looked unsteady, he was staring into the middle-ground, and his mouth hung open awkwardly. After standing there for an excruciating twenty seconds of silence he squinted his eyes, shook his head like a dog, and finally seemed to remember where he was and what he was doing. “I don’t remember the rest of the poem,” he said. Someone in the audience coughed. “Um, yeah. I don’t remember the rest of the words. My friend Josh wrote this poem a couple weeks ago. Well, no, I mean he came up with the poem. It was all off the top of his head. We were watching tv one night, nothing was on. He said, ‘Chris, I have a poem for you’ and then he just started off for like six minutes. Just this brilliant, beautiful poem. He was, um, he’s just fucking brilliant. No, I’m sorry, I didn’t…I didn’t mean to say that. I’m just, um, so, Josh made up this poem and the whole thing just blew me away. I wanted to recite it all for you today but, um, I, I forgot the words. So, Josh died two days ago, right? And I just wanted to share his genius with you but, I guess I can’t. I’m sorry.” And without another word, tears streaming down his reddened cheeks, he walked off the stage.