THE TURQUOISE PEN

BACON BITS

Noël R. King

Truman Smith was an inspired artist. He wrote poetry.

Actually, as he would freely admit, he simply channeled it: He knew it wasn’t he who was writing these odes of elegance and grace. It was his muse, or perhaps even muses, plural. He was that inspired.

People flocked to hear, buy, and read his poetry, even those who really had no use for poetry. It was something new and amazing to them, and they were more than a bit astounded to be so in thrall to something previously so alien to them.

This was awfully fun for Truman, at least for a little while. It was fun and jolly to be famous and recognized wherever he went. It was even more fun and jolly to see all the money come rolling into his bank account, which soon became bank accounts, plural.

For a whole year or so (each seasonal change seemed to give him added inspiration), the poems kept spilling out of him, to ever increasing popularity and critical acclaim. He won prize after prize and honor after honor. Life was good. Life was very, very good.

BUT. These kinds of stories always have a BUT to them, and Truman’s was no exception.

One day Truman realized his quite fabulous life quite bored him to tears. He startled himself one morning during his sumptuous breakfast of bacon, scones, and tea, by realizing the extent to which this was true.

The problem was that he wasn’t doing anything other than being a mouthpiece for his muses. There was no Truman in his poetry; it passed right through him without him having any say in the matter.

At first he had found it quite thrilling to do no work yet bring forth such extraordinary "works." It made him feel smart and good and wonderfully amazing, a true treasure to society even. Others assessed him as being even more wonderful than he did himself, if such a thing were possible.

It was a lovely feeling, to be so adored both from the inside and out.

But. . . . As he was crunching his breakfast this particular morning, reflecting on his newly acknowledged dissatisfaction with this kind of life, regardless of all its seeming wonders, he tried to write a poem in his head to bacon.

His muses were not interested in bacon and refused to pay attention.

But I WANT to write about bacon! he cried to them silently inside his head. I LOVE THIS BACON!

He crunched his bacon, louder, louder, louder, willing them to pay attention, begging them to understand, slobbering wildly over all his desperate yearning.

Still, his muses couldn’t be bothered. There was a sunset in Maui to attend to and then some fluffy clouds in the sky over Borneo.

With dawning dismay, Truman finally understood that his muses only cared about getting their own work out; they didn’t care one whit about important things like perfectly crisp bacon or changing old batteries or spraying WD-40 on things just because you can. They just didn’t care about real things in a real person’s life.

"That does it!" cried Truman once again, this time out loud. "I’ve had it with muses! This is my life, my words, my whatever! It’s time to live, live, LIVE!"

He got a little carried away (and a bit incoherent) in his protestations, but perhaps that is to be expected in such cases.

Truman’s next poem was about the dead spider he found behind his bed, in a pale little pile of dust. Then he wrote about an astoundingly jarring pothole that broke both of his right tires, and a poem about blue toothpaste smears on white towels, and one about the sadness of melted ice. Then he wrote an entire seven-poem series on bacon.

Truman was unstoppable. He had never been so happy in his life. He even changed his last name from Smith to Jones so that nobody would remember his previous, muse-filled days or that he had once channeled his muses’ stupid old poems for them.

Unfortunately, none of Truman’s new, real poems survived in their entirety upon his passing away some 10 years ago. His daughter—you know, the famous Jones who became a household name last year with the publication of her poem, "Borneo, My Borneo"—affectionately used all of her father’s most-prized bacon pieces/works/odes as an under layer for the new wallpaper in the very large kitchen of her new, very large French mansion.

"Oh Daddy!" she smiled as she spread the sticky glue paste on a scrap of pen-filled paper and then slapped the poem upside down on the wall. "It’s too bad you never had any talent. If only you could see me now. You would be so proud."

She paused as she wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. "But don’t you worry, you silly old thing, you dear old dad. I’m carrying on the family name for both of us."

—As circumstances warrant, through her Turquoise Pen column Noël R. King, Scottsville, Virginia, reports on strange and wonderful things, including trouble with muses.