I do not now recall the precise circumstances that inspired it, but now I am sharing it with the Internet. You’re welcome.

WORD TO THE WISE, or Little Tiny Violins — DENIED!

I’m not sure where

I should begin

Except to say

the melodrama’s wearing slightly thin.

My orchestra of Gothic rock

is getting bored,

they want time off.

And there is only so much heaving

A woman’s bosom can withstand.

Now I’m not saying

I’m not guilty

Of wringing hands and clutching brow

But Jesus! there are better ways

to deal — let’s try them now.

Repeat with me

“There’s more to life than angst”

I knew you could!

“My actions will not cause the world to crumble”

That was good!

Of course it isn’t easy — did I ever say it was?

Decision-making sucks but you should make them.

Why? Because –

I’ll break in here to interrupt myself, to make it clear

This poem’s addressed not just to you, but also to me, dear.

And so I say to both of us

In doggerel paraphrase

Act or the world acts on you.

That’s it! Case closed! New phase.

Is this about Laika? If not, title should be changed. And do you want your readers to immediately think about your protagonist marking territory? If not, don’t put the dog among trees.

Okay, so she’s young and little — does she have a name? Where was she going when she got lost? What’s this about a trail she was “supposed” to go on? Who’s giving this dog orders?

Also, I’m not loving the brown-on-brown. We can barely see the dog. Is that a deliberate choice? Losing her in the illustration as she’s lost in the narrative?

And is that a tree, or a letter Y with a green cottonball on top? Can you explain why there only seems to be half an inch of sky? Are you playing with the picture plane? I get that formal experimentation can be a vital approach to graphic storytelling, but it seems an odd choice for this text.

All right, finally this story has some stakes. But you’re draining all the tension away by just baldly stating that she “accidently” (You have a spellchecker, right? I recommend using it.) got into a “test space ship.” How did it happen? What’s the test? Exclamation points are not a substitute for coherence. Good use of burst lines around the cop’s whistle, but why are there no NASA personnel depicted? Are the people in yellow intended to be perceived as wearing uniforms? If so, for what organization?

Also, I wish I did not need to point out that all your people are far too close to the ship, which incidentally lacks a platform. Research is important!

Ah, yes, Mars. The green planet. See above re: research. And again we have a sliver of colored sky, with what would appear to be stars, unless they are fireflies, or flashlights, or flaws in the paper — you give us no indication in the text. And again, you seem to wish to actively avoid all narrative tension. “She got out.” No panic upon realizing that she is trapped, no struggle to free herself — you deny your readers any chance to become engaged with the plight of your protagonist.

All right, I’ll ignore the massive physics fail and merely recommend, again, that you do some research. Again, you have entirely failed to create dramatic tension here. I don’t even know who this dog is! How am I supposed to care?

The arrow seems to suggest an interest in diagrammatic illustration. Perhaps in light of your artistic limitations, you should consider using that style throughout.

Pure wish fulfillment. Isn’t it really the author who would want to live in a world where she would never get lost again?

I will comment here only to note that this “owner” — is the lack of names meant to be universalizing? There are far better ways to achieve that goal — makes her first appearance on page seven of eight.

This haunting page almost redeems the ham-handedness of the rest of the narrative. The empty space calls into question the happy ending on page six, forcing the reader to wonder if “The End” is merely the conclusion of the story, or the end of the world.

Annotations, from above left:

I remember being very excited to find the heart sticker with my name in it. Despite the fact that now I know approximately a million Saras, in the eighties, it was rare to encounter any name-related ephemera spelled sans H.

Lord of the Rings sticker. I was in a fan club. There were newsletters. This was — okay, it wasn’t before Orlando Bloom was born, but it was, you know, years before Peter Jackson even made Meet the Feebles.

Sandra Boynton elephant. Did you know she has designed over four thousand greeting cards? I didn’t either.

Why, yes, WHYT was a Top 40 station, why do you ask? It would be ninth grade before I discovered WCBN.

Gandalf for President. Edited to add, in proto-anarchism (that would come in ninth grade, too): “Or Nobody.”

Cheshire Cat sticker.

Giant Ghostbusters sticker.

Great American Smokeout sticker. They gave these out at school. I think we were supposed to go home with them and tell our parents to stop smoking, since in seventh grade, very few of us had taken it up.

Powdermilk Biscuits postcard. Sigh. I would listen to the show sometimes with my dad.

Shiny foil musical note rainbow sticker. Because it was very important to reinforce one’s essential musicality with representations of musical notes.

Shiny foil rainbow unicorn sticker. (What was it with shiny foil stickers? I do not know, except that they were shiny, and also foil.)

There are some traces of yet other stickers, the nature of which are lost to memory.

Tell me something about your seventh grade year? Or Year Seven, as the case may be.

I think I wrote it — if I wrote it — in college, not long after reading The Bacchae. I can’t think of a time before or since when I’ve been inclined to use the word “thyrsus.” I don’t think it’s, like, great or anything, but I reproduce it here for curiosity’s sake, and apologize to any accountants reading this for my slur on your profession:

Wise Champagne

And who will give me wise champagne, a Bacchus-regulator,

Taming the Maenads’ fury with reason’s hand?

Supply the genius without aftermath,

God-touch sans bloody hands and aching head?

I would cultivate that rarer vine,

Seek out the mildest soil and kindest sun,

Read tax returns over the growing shoots,

Hire CPAs to tread the season’s vintage.

But passion would creep in, all uninvited,

Shake his thyrsus and cry, “Begin the dance!”

…Anyone else, have you ever run across a piece of writing that you cannot for the life of you remember having written?