There once was a poet who could not rhyme. So, he wrote in the form of short stories to avoid the need to do that. But his style simply did not work well for narratives. His sentences were sparse. Deliberate. And always imperfect. So, to make up for this flaw, he writes the next paragraph in an overly descriptive manner. He reads Stephen King, J R. R. Tolkien, and all the other artists that made it as authors that he knows he will never be, and decides to write a whole paragraph about onions.

After all, there is no better way for his audience to understand the blockbuster potential of the universe that spontaneously formed in his head if he does not describe every minute detail about it, right down to the onions. He will describe the distinct royal swirl of purple and pink that form an unpolished shade of ruby, enticing one to its taste. Only to epiphanize on the inevitably gut-wrenching taste of the onion. A vegetable that seems so succulent is layered in rings of deceit, a bitter, traitorous deceit. Of course, onion slices as occasional flavorings to fried foods are permissible, but for fried onion rings to be considered an appetizing dish is inhumane and an affront to all of those who have layered tastes of their own, or God forbid, functional taste buds that recognize the inherent flaw in consuming onions as a dish. The poet pauses for a moment. Perhaps he has split the pro-onion and anti-onion sides of his audience? So, then he ponders on the positives of the onion, he cannot find any. Playing onion’s advocate was not on his agenda, they are simply too putrid and dishonest.

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It is at this point that the poet realizes how pointless and absurd his paragraph about onions is towards his story. Who was he kidding? He was a victim of his middle-class upbringing, he had not experienced war, or loss, or even an injury or disease. His parents had not divorced, he was loved and supported, and he had not a damn thing to complain about in this world, with the exception of onions. 

The poet tries to lay back on his cushy bed away from the blinding light of his computer screen in order to find a spark of creative grief or motivation and imagines that his girlfriend is murdered, or that his family dies in a car crash, or that he even achieves the average college student’s greatest dream of being run over by a bus on campus. However, the poet and everyone around him are always doing well, so he writes about the one subject that always brings him grief, himself. But in an attempt to sound less egotistic, he writes in the third person, which he now realizes is not working. 

So, with a sigh of relief, and another sentence amateurly begun with a coordinating conjunction, the poet imbibes himself in a few hundred words in a notepad and moves on with his class work. Maybe one day, he thinks to himself, he will look back on how young, dumb, and numb he was to his passion. How he put it aside so often because of a battle between the brain and the heart that never existed. How he knew he could have been an author by now if he had only been daring enough to put aside textbooks for a fraction as long as he put aside his dreams? The poet’s alarm started ringing and then realized he was late to his morning classes, and traded his journal for a formula sheet and a TI-84.