NaPoWriMo2021 – April 8

And last but not least, our (optional) prompt. I call this one “Return to Spoon River,” after Edgar Lee Masters’ eminently creepy 1915 book Spoon River Anthology. The book consists of well over 100 poetic monologues, each spoken by a person buried in the cemetery of the fictional town of Spoon River, Illinois.

Today, I’d like to challenge you to read a few of the poems from Spoon River Anthology, and then write your own poem in the form of a monologue delivered by someone who is dead. Not a famous person, necessarily – perhaps a remembered acquaintance from your childhood, like the gentleman who ran the shoeshine stand, or one of your grandmother’s bingo buddies.

Patrick

I can’t believe I did that all those years

Serving as maître d’ of the Cape Cod Room

in the Drake Hotel in Chicago

I spent my life trying to make people happy

Sometimes I succeeded,

sometimes I didn’t give a shit

no one would have guessed the latter

I truly enjoyed about half the clients

Twenty five percent were tolerable

and the other twenty five percent

I would have rather kicked in the teeth

Smug, arrogant sons of bitches

but I took their bribe money

They wouldn’t have known a good table

if it had jumped up and bit them in the ass