I think it was Merlot.

Today's NaPoWrIMo poem is a cautionary tale

 

I think it was Merlot.
 
So the poet, on the wrong side of two bottles of supermarket red
found himself in that hinterland serving sleep and melancholia.
{Again!} 
 
This time he found himself back with the girl he’d ached for when he was eighteen.
Really ached for. Heart ache, head ache, ball ache, all of it delivered in stunning 3D HD clarity.
{It was like he’d been there.} 
 
As you do these days, he tracked her down through social media
for the purposes of gossip and blackmail,
and exchanged cool, friendly banter.
They played Top Trumps with their lives.
{Outdid each other with their parents’ deaths.}
 
With that special obsession only writers know,
he turned hermit for the week, courting his vocabulary for their very best.
Image, metaphor and his own DNA Frankensteined into a poem,
about the risk he never took,
{“The thirty year kiss”.}
 
It was the business. Walked the line between low and high-brow,
appealed to men and women; gay and straight; young and old;
the religious and sane.
{Reader, it won prizes!} 
 
He emerged from the soup of getting by to slight notoriety,
appeared on radio stations with single digits.
{A chance to bemuse millions instead of dozens.}
 
It was a slow news day when the journalist took an interest.
They wondered if this was just a poem or if there really was a girl
and if so, is there a picture of her in a bikini?
{Because that’s what journalism is now.}
 
So the name came out and something of an idea, turned in to a brouhaha,
took steroids and became an EVENT. The paper would reunite the two.
He, the poet, she the big shot something from the city.
 It would be epically awesome and awesomely epic!
{In the way these things never actually are.}
 
The day arrived and the public needed to know.
Press, TV, bloggers and probable government spies
crowded the discreet London hotel,
indiscreetly leaked on Twitter.
{This was it!}
 
He was surrounded by the scaffolding of media,
microphones and lenses in angular disharmony.
The lights made him sweat through the new stiff shirt
to the, for once, dry cleaned suit.
{Here she is.}
 
He rose to meet her and never saw the balled fist,
marble-hard and viper-quick snake to his jaw.
He said later that his momentum made it look worse than it was,
but that punch would have dropped him anywhere, any time.
{It was like she’d trained for it.}
 
He had to watch the news to hear the tirade because he was out cold.
The bleep machine man earned his money that day. It broke down to:
a)      He was a BLEEP
b)      She had a serious BLEEPING career where she’d worked hard to make men accept her as an equal not an object of desire.
c)      This poetry BLEEP had set her back ten years
d)      He should leave her the BLEEP alone
{Damn, she looked good saying it though!}
 
He turned hermit again, waiting for
swelling and bruises to end their rainbow tale.
Everyone knows his name now and
parodies are the new Harlem Shake.
At least he’s made some money though,
{and these days, he drinks a better red.}