Ballad Concerning Events Which Transpired During the First World War

I wrote a ballad about events which transpired during World War I.

I stuffed it into my mouth and began chewing it. Chewing. Choo choo. The sound of a train. The wrath of Kurt Cobain.

Seattle is dreary place. A Marine West Coast environment ought to be conducive to suicide.

So why do you live, stripped to bare, naked existence? Apparently, you've got thinking to do. You see, you are merely a simulacrum of my ballad about events which transpired during the First World War. You do not exist, in the technical sense of the word.

The pulp of the paper had a bitter-almond taste.

It was cyanide. Someone had known that I would write a poem about events which transpired during the First World War. Someone had known that I would write it and chew it in my mouth. Someone had broken into a paper plant, and laced a sheet of paper with the extract of a ten thousand apple pips.

It had been arranged and there was nothing to be done about it.

Or perhaps it was just the ink. Perhaps they had flavored the ink with bitter almonds, so as to take advantage of government subsidies for the bitter-almond industry, and have their product classified as food. That must be it.

So I would not die after all.

I could taste the trenches of the Somme. Verdun had a slightly more mellow flavor. But I did not like it, really. It was not as good as the New York Times front page, which always had a zesty aftertaste reminiscent of paprika and key lime chicken broth, nor the writings of Wittgenstein.

I tasted the screams of the soldiers who fell before the machine gun turrets. It reminded me of Pikachu evolving into Raichu.

But my ballad will never be read. Oh, what could have been! No one will ever hear of the actions of those great men who died in the trenches. My words will not inspire thousands of young Americans, to stand up and fight for the right to bite. My words will not give solace to the poor, the suffering, who sit in the metaphorical trenches of ignoramusdom.

If I chew my poem, and spit out the pulp, and dry it, and pay for the remains to be dispersed into space, will I then achieve literary immortality.

Perhaps, an alien species in the distant future will collect a small particle of the dispersed poem and calculate what the text of the poem must have been by measuring the mystical properties of the cellulose fibers. Because the part resembles the whole and the whole universe is fractal in nature.

Then they'll read it, and know about the passions of our species.

They will weep for us. And at last man will be saved. And the fiery sword which turns every will no longer keep us in the Garden. At last, we shall be free.

But will the recreated poem still be my poem? I assume that they will make it into a Hollywood movie, starring an animatronic chiropractor. But then it will be just another piece of meaningless media, of the military-industrial complex, partly owned by Saudi Binladin Group, those damn capitalist bastards. And no one will feel what I feel. They will merely engage in mass production. It will not be true happiness. Corruption. I can feel the anger within me.

But I fought in those trenches, you see. How dare they engage in this deceit, this weaving of their treacherous tales?