The muse strikes in the strangest places

Last week, amid the white noise of Christmas party patter, I very clearly heard a man’s voice say, “I lost my pen in a river of poop.” At first I thought I had imagined it, or perhaps I was projecting my own efflucentric lifestyle on some oblivious partygoer. But on the way home, my wife confirmed that she heard it, too. She had been closer to the conversation; apparently, the man works as a nurse and was regaling a not-so-rapt audience with one of those revolting tales that nurses find commonplace and amusing and non-nurses would really rather not hear about, thankyouverymuch.

The sentence stuck with me for a while, because of its wonderfully lyric quality. This is a sentence, I thought, that cries out to be the first line of a poem. So now, it is.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
Thinner than oatmeal, thicker than soup
It would have offended C. Everett Koop
To see the streets pulsing with feculent goop.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
It circled a camp in a large, viscous loop
And swallowed an unwitting Boy Scout troop
It took me just over a month to regroup.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
That slithered on by my apartment’s front stoop
I tried to give chase in my single-mast sloop
But the mainsail got snared in a basketball hoop.

I lost my pen in a river of poop
Too runny to mold, too solid to scoop
And though it was part of a very rare group
That pen is a loss I hope not to recoup.