Of Ducks and Awkward Gratitude

Imagining an awkward encounter

Hello, Fellow Awkward Ducks!

Here are some ducks and an imagined awkward encounter! Instead of an essay today you get the regular haiku comic and what I think is the longest poem I’ve ever posted here. Don’t worry, it’s still a short read or listen.

crisp wind ensemble,
fall colors dance on water
ducks glide across pond

If I Ever Meet Billy Corgan It Will Be In A Bookshop

If I ever meet Billy Corgan, it will be in a bookshop. Not
a bookstore filled with calendars, shiny hardbacks, 
and overpriced coffee, but a proper bookshop that
peddles some new, but mostly used books and is more
mold and musk then bright and welcoming. 

It will be on my first trip to New York City. I will spy the
shop with a clever name, something like Tome Raider or
The Dog Ear, while walking down some street and enter.

It will be the kind of shop where the owner’s nephew 
mans the till on weekends when he’s home from Columbia,
where he's studying economics, because his mom makes him, 
and so his visage drips with disdain and he makes passive 
aggressive comments about each customer purchase because 
he thinks he’s clever but he’s just an asshole. 

I’ll spy Billy bent over to grab something from below the shelf
that’s bowing under the weight of obscure Russian literature titles
in a narrow aisle while on my way to a collection of hipster
Beat-revival chapbooks. Billy will stand up and we will meet
eye-to-eye, bald head to bald head. He’ll politely nod and I will
say:

Thank you for your music.

I want you to know that my freshman year in college, my best
friend and roommate C would get back from classes about the same 
time as me each day. C would enter the apartment we shared with four 
other dudes without saying a word and head straight for our shared bedroom 
and pull out my copy of Siamese Dream, and blast Today. C would close his eyes,
sigh a Sisyphean sigh, and then smile. Before the song ended he would say, “It’s 
lunch time.” 

Billy will smile and make to leave the conversation and my life while 
saying something like, “I’m glad my music meant something to you.” 
But before he escapes the aisle, I’ll add:

My first book of poetry comics is called Quantum Joy Infinite Melancholy 
after your 1995 double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I still
have trouble spelling melancholy right because of that album. Your music gave
me so much—well—a lot of—not something as fragile and fleeting as joy. Your
music gave me a lot of understanding, and I just wanted to say thank you.

Billy’s body language will show his discomfort and I will understand that
I have overstayed my welcome in the aisle and in his life. Thanks, I will mutter
before turning around and walking out of the store at a brisk New York pace, never
getting to look at the hipster Beat-revival chapbooks.

Later, when I tell people about meeting Billy Corgan, I’ll never be able to
remember the name of the bookshop, and I’l never find that shop again no
matter how many times I go down that street where it once was and has always 
been. I’ll half-believe the whole thing was a Manhattan fae food-fueled fever dream.
But, then I will remember the smell of the Russian literature section and the look of 
condescension on the nephew’s face behind the register and the look of panic and
pain in Billy Corgan’s eyes. 

Then I will listen to Bullet with Butterfly Wings and
understand myself a little better. 

Be the poetry you want to see in the world!

Cheers,

Jason