Man of Letters 2

Here is the second chapter of Man of Letters. It is incomplete, but I figured I'd post what I have so far!

PRODIGY

It was clear to my parents that I was a prodigy. Now I know that such phraseology gets tossed around a lot these days—a young boy need only discover his own anus to be the next Oppenheimer, or a teenage girl grow breasts before the age of twelve to be the next American Idol—but when I was young, to be a prodigy was something rather special. Aside from my uncanny propensity to flawlessly imitate birdcalls (a passion I still harbor), I was a surprisingly precocious child. I once stole a pair of my mother’s pantyhose and wore them on my head as a superhero’s mask, which resulted in a display of heroism in the neighbor’s front lawn, sun-faded Chewley’s Gum beach towel clothes-pinned around my neck as a cape. My father, in turn, feared I may have been one of those fellatiazing homosexuals (although after perusing some of these memoirs, I discern that such a thing is now rather in vogue). Fear not, Queensberry—I am no posing somdomite.
My first serious poetic break was in the fifth grade, after I composed some minor verses attempting to express some of my deepest sentiments toward humanity as part of our poetry unit. It was called “The People Poem.” The teacher was so impressed that she called my parents and shared my piece with them, haunted by my Poe-esque rhyming skills and certainly overwhelmed by (indeed, falling short of fully comprehending) the scope of my linguistic mastery. After informing them that I was a truly gifted young man, she asked permission to submit the poem to a literary magazine. Thrilled at the prospect of making any money off their son, my parents quickly agreed, although were disappointed to discover that the magazine did not offer any compensation for its contributors’ time or talents. So my first poem appeared published in Elementary Fiction . . . and Verse, Too!, volume 7, issue 22 (as virtually all my fans now know). You may find this early work in my anthology, Lines Upon My Face, although I will include a deleted verse here:
There are car people, bar people,
People who’ll go far people,
War people, bore people,
People who will score people.
These lines were much too personal for me to include in my early edition as a child, so I chose to remove them and keep them private. Undoubtedly some of the best writers—I have met a few—keep their best verses in a box under their bed, never to be read, and so did I in my youthful naïveté with these lines.
After my breakthrough success, my teacher encouraged me to continue writing at all costs. In order to support me, she allowed me to give up many other aspects of the curriculum in order to focus on writing. Every day became for me a writing workshop, wherein I mastered heroic couplets, trochaic hexameter, and the diamante, yet regrettably fell behind in geography, arithmetic, and social skills. Naturally, what that caring teacher nurtured for the rest of my time with her was quickly pummeled and suppressed during my next seven years of public education, during which my teachers collectively rooted out any wriggling specimen of creativity within my psyche, pinned it to a piece of sea-weed smelling wax, dissected it and discarded it in brown plastic biohazard bags. By the time I graduated high school, I was less qualified for perseverance in the literary world than Jane Austen.
My undergraduate years were spent feebly trying to reclaim my early creative talents. While I was studying English literature at Columbia, I put pen back to paper and rekindled my love for writing poetry; Alexander Pope blew it out. I remember so often sitting down to my desk, hoping to construct a brilliant bunch of lines in sweet rhythms paired with deliciously rhyming heroic couplets. Unfortunately, it seems that Pope took every last rhyme available to a writer in English, much as Joyce utlilized every pun in any language in Finnegans Wake. Naturally, I rigged up a dart board with Pope’s wretched little face on it for taking out my frustration when the verses simply refused to come. I briefly considered writing nonsense in the style of T. S. Eliot or Emily Dickinson, assuming the English rhyme to have died with Pope, but kept chipping away at it until I finally got back into the swing of things. I still recall my first successful heroic couplets from those days, which I never did end up publishing for fear of libel. It was a carpe diem poem to a rather handsome nun my mother knew. The opening lines were as follows:
That sinless snowflake, Sister Drake, belongs
In bed with Brother Jake. She says ‘tis wrong
To give one’s flesh those coital thrills; does God
Espouse abstention, still? A holy bod
Is built for lust, so Sister’s perfect frame
(I’ve seen) must be designed for am’rous aims.
While sage it seems, redeeming heathen fools,
Forget not Brother Jake’s unbaptized tool,
Which holds the key to something sweeter
Than anything beyond the gates of Peter.