Word Processing by Ted Jackins

Word Processing

I ate four typewriter
Ribbons and shit out
A half dozen poems,
Four short stories
And a couple of novels.
It’s a strange world
When you’re starving,
You’ll eat almost anything
And say “Fuck the consequences,”
Little rivulets of ink
Trickling from the corners
Of your mouth as all
Those strange words
Pour out the other end,
And you sit by breathing
Smoke and sweating
Wild fires,
Then it’s back to bed,
For once not having
To worry about what
Books to read,
For there they all are
Floating just beneath
The lid,
Somehow not half
As full of shit as all
Those New York Times
Bestsellers of the day,
All lined up against
One another.
For nothing holds
As much truth in
This world as those
Things which fall
Out of you
Behind closed doors,
In the privacy
Of your own home.

Ted Jackins vanished along with the rest of his platoon somewhere in Hanoi in 1968. Rumors that he was actually born in 1982 and is alive and well living with his wife and multiple cats in a small town in North Carolina have yet to be confirmed. His work has appeared in Red Fez, Zygote In My Coffee, Blotterature, Citizens For Decent Literature and on the compilation They Came To Destroy the Carolinas Volume 2 from Dead Wax Records.

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