Murder in the Fourth Stanza

There’s a pen sitting in the middle of the floor, poised on top of a discolored stain in the carpet. It wasn’t there when I walked in the room and I don’t quite recall anyone dropping a pen on the floor. The stain, however, has been there since I care to remember, like family or a cancerous mole. I want to remove it, to eradicate it, but I know it’s essential to gripping people’s attention. It’s how I make them care.

The way it’s sitting there, just staring at me, it looks like it’s ready to strike, standing off with me. The ball point is pressing out of the end, as if it’s pointing at me, calling me out. Passive-aggressive penmanship I guess you could say. I’m pretty sure that’s how Nixon became president.

And what’s with that stain? It almost matches the carpet, but in a way which makes me a bit queasy. It’s the kind of queasy you might feel, scratching itself into your brain, when you place eggshell white and stark white next to each other and insist they’re the same, like wedding dresses and homosexual love. One of these ideas you spend abhorrent amounts of money on to find it tossed aside by societal expectations and marginalized when you bring up using it again and the other is homosexual love. It makes my eyes hurt.

It’s the juxtaposition of the two which intrigues me the most. Is the pen lying in a pool of blood? Has that pen been here the whole time and it’s finally chosen to reveal itself, tired of the charade? Did it murder something and get tired of running away? There was a movie I saw once, where a woman stuck a pen in a man’s throat in self-defense. Did this pen beat out the sword like we hypothesize it should?

The symbolism is way too strong here when we talk of pens, blood, and murder. We could say that an author’s thoughts, their ideas, were disemboweled, spilled out across the paper and floor, only a small amount of the words making their way onto the page. Minimalists might say it’s genius. I would call it literary vomit.

Or maybe this is a metaphor for lost love. I’m not sure how, but we often marry romance with words, unless the pen is literally someone’s lost love and they didn’t realize they dropped it on the floor. If that’s the case, they’re a dime a dozen at the dollar store, although I’m pretty sure it’s illegal in most states to pay for love.

The most likely conclusion we can reach, from the evidence provided, is that it’s just a fucking pen on the fucking floor and that the fucking stain came from some asshole who spilt their fucking coffee and didn’t fucking clean it up properly. It’s a post-modernist crime scene, not a Shakespearean love story. After all, Romeo and Juliet died because they didn’t know how to communicate. That’s why I don’t study literature critically.