The best poem Harrod Tschjēlphf ever wrote was titled ‘Untitled #347’. It is about a young girl that falls in love with a much older boy. At first their relationship is purely sexual in nature, but after a while the two make eye-contact and they find out they actually have one or two things in common. They fall in love, deeply, madly etc. but then the girl’s father – who is a professional landscape artist – finds out about their affaire and cuts off the boy’s dick with a portable lawnmower and lets him bleed to death.
Goodbye romance, hello PTSD.
Harrod and I went to high school together. When school was out we either wrote poetry together or read each other’s poems. Whenever I was bored in class I watched the back of Harrod’s neck. It was greasy and full of red zits with large yellow heads. I tried to draw invisible lines between the zits to create animal faces and discovered entire zoos right between Harrod’s shoulders and head.
We were really close.
I thought I knew him really well.
One day during math-class Harrod dropped a book on the floor and I grabbed it before he could pick it up. I looked at him and read fear in his eyes, but for some reason that didn’t stop me from opening the little booklet. I flipped the cover and found no pages. The thing I was holding looked like a book but actually was some sort of container. Inside that container were pictures of boys in girl’s clothing on the left and quite a few neatly folded paper handkerchiefs on the right side, held in place by some sort of elastic ribbon.
I was stunned.
I looked at Harrod’s freaked out face and he looked at my surprised face and he grabbed his secret thing from my hands and disappeared from the classroom.
I never saw Harrod again.
Somehow this forgotten bag of handkerchiefs reminded me of an old friend.
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