"I like a thing simple but it must be simple through complication."
-Gertrude Stein
<I>Reflection
Richard was dancing around his apartment naked when, passing in front of a full length mirror, he noticed for the first time in his life that he had an extremely hairy ass. This revelation surprised him, though looking back on that moment hours later, he didn't know why. He had a hairy chest. His arms, legs, knuckles, ankles, and toes were hairy as well. Occasionally, Richard took note of the hair that sat proudly upon his shoulders like the lapels of a great general. Reaching beyond those shoulders one day, he had pawed his back to discover still more hair.
Later that day Richard sat fully clothed at the kitchen table thinking about this new perception of his ass. Stroking the long hairs of his beard, he understood that it was silly of him to have been so shocked at seeing the reflection of his rear end there in front of him, full and fuzzy with the forest of fine black follicles he had long known to cover the rest of his body. "I ought to dance naked more often," he thought. "Who knows what else I've been missing all these years?"
Richard went into the bathroom and combed his ass, careful to part the hair to the left so as to favor his better side.
<I>Romanticism
Ronald was sitting on the toilet in the third stall. As things were taking longer than he had expected he looked around, searching for something to pass the time. Ronald wished he had brought his checkbook; he could have paid his bills and balanced his account by now. Looking up at the pale blue metal door in front of him, he noticed some small scribblings, graffiti, marks left by a man who had been here before him.Sure that there was no one else in the men's room, he read aloud the first few words, scrawled with black ink in a sweeping script: "'Much madness is divinest sense' - E.D."
"Ahh yes, the dear Miss Dickinson, how I love her mystical words," Ronald thought quietly, suddenly unsettled by his voice echoing against the tile walls of the empty lavatory. Then he noticed a next line scrawled in smudged blue ink below the first: "Who the f-ck is that?" A bold arrow pointed accusingly at the "E.D." It seemed a simple question, and after flushing the toilet, pulling up his pants, tucking in his shirt and buckling his belt, Ronald whipped out one of his favorite red pens, leaned over against the cold metal, and wrote clearly, "Emily Dickinson, dickwad!" It was cathartic. He had felt proud coming to the defense of the powerless Belle of Amherst. "And she'd be proud of me, that crazy poetess," he told himself as he left the bathroom and returned to his office. "She'd be grateful."
But later he felt guilty and immature. His remorse ate away at him, tearing at his every thought. That evening he called up an old friend. They hadn't communicated in well over a year. She was a fellow poetry fanatic whose long dark hair, perky breasts, and affinity for caesuras he remembered as exceptionally attractive. They used to talk for hours about Byron and Bishop, Shelley and Stevens.
And as if they had just graduated only yesterday, they picked up where they had left off. She told him that it was OK, that "Emily surely wouldn't mind, because it's not like she's the one who was the dickwad." Ronald felt better and they talked Whitman and Ferlinghetti, ancient mariners and grecian urns. He felt full of life again as his heart pounded with the furious beat of iambic pentameter. He asked her to join him for dinner next Saturday. She was busy on Saturday, she said, and suggested instead that they go for tea Sunday afternoon. Tea, he thought, how poetic. It was agreed.
Gently she said, "Goodnight," and he replied eagerly, louder than usual, "Ahhh, my dear, do not go gentle into that good night." He could hear her giggling softly as she hung up the phone.
