2 Poems by Matthew McGuirk

Click to access 2-POEMS-BY-MATTHEW-MCGUIRK.pdf

He’ll Always be Sam from ‘Lord of the Rings’ to me!

CW: Potential TV Show Spoiler Alert

‘What’d I miss?’ The room was a dark cave.
She always insisted on watching scary or gory shows and movies in the dark,
or scary and gory in this case.
‘Jim died!’ She sat on her side of the bed, watching the TV glow across the room.
‘Which one’s Jim?’ I slid in with the freshly popped kernels.
‘You know…Jim, the sciency guy with glasses.’ She paused the show.
‘Are you paying attention at all?’
‘Ah, Sam,’ I shot back.
Disgusted look, ‘no, Jim!’
Smiling and popping popcorn in my mouth,
‘he’ll always be Sam from ‘Lord of the Rings’ to me!’
‘Whatever, that’s a stupid movie anyways!
Where’s that popcorn?’
She reached a hand over and I pulled the bowl back to my side,
‘My precious!’ I hissed.

What Sort of Movies are We Watching?

My daughter is approaching the age to start introducing movies,
three seems reasonable, right?
Start her off with some Disney and maybe move into Pixar after that, seems logical.
I was thinking about this the other day because she’s into mermaids,
even takes a mermaid Barbie in the bath with her.
What about The Little Mermaid?
Then I paused, almost stopped the car in the middle of the road thinking about Ursula.
She is scary as hell for a children’s movie.
She takes away Ariel’s voice and becomes a 100 foot tall Octopus woman, no thank you!

Maybe 101 Dalmatians?
We have a dog though and I know how upset my daughter would get if she was taken from us.
I get the shivers thinking about that skunk hairdo taking
our little Frenchie in the middle of the night.

Aladdin was another choice,
it’s got the monkey and the genie,
but Jaffar makes all hell break loose at the end of that one
and I don’t really want to introduce her to
the apocalypse yet.

Between scary 100 foot octopus lady, skunk haired dog snatcher
and literal hell on earth, we are steering clear of those movies
at least for a while.
At this point, I think we’re just going to start her with Halloween,
because at least Mike Myers only comes once a year.

(See .pdf above for original line breaks.)

Photo by pan xiaozhen on Unsplash
Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash

ABOUT MATTHEW MCGUIRK

Matt McGuirk teaches and lives with his family in New Hampshire. BOTN 2021 nominee with words in various lit mags and a debut collection with Alien Buddha Press called Daydreams, Obsessions, Realities available on Amazon and linked on his website.

Website: http://linktr.ee/McGuirkMatthew

Twitter: @McguirkMatthew / Instagram: @mcguirk_matthew.