It’s spring cleaning time, and I just found a manila envelope filled with junk from my elementary school days. Check out these two poems … I think I wrote them in 6th grade:

If you can’t read my handwriting, the poems are:

Cigarette.
Ugly and grotesque.
Puffing up pollution.
Why can’t you be replaced by gum.

Death.
Lonely and scary.
Drifting in to unsuspecting victims.
Must you be so sudden?

I guess the assignment was to write the most depressing poems possible, making sure that each poem ends with a question that speaks to the futility of existence?

“Why can’t you be replaced by gum.”

I also found a short story I wrote in which I am the 11-year-old President of the United States and I’m visited by an arms dealer who tries to sell me weapons and I just make wisecracks until he “looked at me as if he wanted to kill me.” Maybe I’ll serialize it later this week.