This morning I was running late for several business meetings I suspected I should have with corporations about business. This meant I’d have to forgo my preferred method of getting around town – wrestling alligators, and using the momentum of the wrestling to propel me forward – and take that most loathsome of all transportation, public transportation.

I dislike the subway because it’s filled with common people, who get unrealistically upset when I tell them about all the nice cars I have currently in the shop, and how the hubcaps alone are probably worth more than their children’s educations. “Real expensive, huh?” they’ll say, barely cloaking their anger at my expensive dollar-signed hat, long diamond-tipped cane and, held aloft in my gloved hand, a preposterously large diamond-tipped diamond.

“No no,” I’ll say. “The hubcaps are inexpensive. I meant to say that you don’t educate your children.” I add that perhaps the problem rests in them being too filthy to understand me, or their cumbersome foreheads being so grotesquely misshapen as to bend incoming sound waves.

Or possibly, I conjecture, their faces are just stupid. So as not to lose the intellectual upper hand, I’ll say this in Latin. “Tui visio es stupidus, retardo.” Alert readers may note the literal translation of this — “Your face is stupid, slowly” — makes no sense, since light refracts off of my retinas with such speed that the faces of common people are stupid almost immediately. However, I prefer including it anyway, on the grounds that it sounds like I have renamed my adversary; and, in the intense Latin heat of our discourse, have christened him ‘Retardo’.

“Yo, fuck you, man,” I am usually told. This is good news for my fists, since they will get to fight. If I don’t feed Lefty and Squanto six common men a day, they waste away to nothing and lose all the registered lethal weapon status my government has cautiously vested in them. At this point I’ll say something else in Latin – gibberish, usually – and then the subway car becomes a flurry of fist-shaped movement, lit by the disco ball effect of my diamond-tipped diamond.

Today’s subway ride, however, would offer pleasures of a non-pugilistic variety. I was standing in the center of the subway car minding my own business, composing poetry in my head and then, deeming this insufficient, loudly with my voice.

“My soul is like an autumn tree bereft of leaves,” I say, rocking the senses of everyone present like a poetry hurricane. “My lake of sadness is like a boat on the ocean. Also, check it: Elysium.”

“Shut up!” I am told helpfully.

“You talk about guns like I ain’t got none,” I say ponderously, lifting my hand aloft in time with the verse for maximum dramatic effect. “What, you think I sold ‘em all?” My voice lilts upwards at ‘sold ‘em all’ to more accurately convey my disbelief with the claim.

“Sit… the fuck… down!” someone yells. Yes! A challenge. I unsheathe Lefty and Squanto from their gloved repositories and put them up in front of me in the form of dukes, as if to say “bring it.”

Bring what, you may ask. The answer, of course, is the noise.

Before I’m able to punch anyone this morning, however, I am tapped on the shoulder by a chubby young man with one of those face-circumferencing beards that fattos use to simulate jaw lines nowadays. I turn around to punch him, but he stops me, not with his fists, but with his tears.

“Your poetry is astounding,” he tells me, his eyes wet and, I have to admit, somewhat bosomy in the soft light of the subway tunnel. “You should come to my poetry reading.”

I explain to him that this would be super-fine. “When is it,” I ask, “and would you mind if I punched you anyway?”

“What? I – arghh!” he replies, as Lefty and Squanto bring the man vast portions of noise.

I arrive several hours later at a nearby Starbucks, where I am ushered to the couches in the back. Sim-Jawline introduces me to a group of people who claim to be poetry enthusiasts, and who look ridiculous. One girl has rings in her nose and ratty black dreadlocks that look like she used tar for shampoo. On another couch, a white-faced scarecrow with glasses and an ironic 80’s t-shirt (Micronauts, I think) tips his latte slightly in my direction.

I sit patiently while Tar-locks starts the proceedings, reciting some nonsense about her vagina being a prison. To pass the time I imagine Tony “Scarface” Montana and Manny discussing a prison break in her vagina-yard, while elsewhere Tim Robbins burrows successfully out of her uterus to freedom using only a rock hammer and patience.

Eventually she tapers off in mid-sentence and bows her head, which even if she wasn’t finished seems like a good time for me to start clapping. Others join in, and together we indicate closure to whatever Tar-locks was mumbling about her vagina. Then it’s my turn. Finally.

I open with a poem about Tim Robbins’ inspiring escape from Tar-locks’ vagina. As I detail the magnetic boots that seal all prisoners to her uterine walls when the alarm sounds for an escape attempt, I’m given a look by Tar-locks that indicates my homage isn’t getting the reception I’d hoped for. Eager to not ruffle feathers, I switch thematic direction — explaining that her vagina is, now that I think of it, less like a prison and more like a G.I. Joe armored personnel carrier, except without as many wheels, and not capable of holding more than five action figures at once. It is at this point that I’m interrupted and told to stop talking about Tar-locks’ vagina altogether.

“But she did!” I interject.

“She’s allowed,” Sim-Jawline explains. “It’s her vagina.”

“Big deal,” I pout, but reluctantly agree to switch topics. My next impromptu poem concerns the guy in the Micronauts t-shirt's vagina, which I am careful to imply is superior to Tar-locks’ in every way. I am in mid-description of his engorged labia when I am once again interrupted.

“No vaginas at all,” it is agreed. I say that I wasn’t aware it was the policy of this poetry reading to make up rules as we go. The observation is received coolly. For a bunch of Leftists, they’re extremely touch-and-go when it comes to personal liberties. Micronauts makes a play for the conch shell, clearing his throat and pulling several damp pages of verse out of his pocket, and so I plough ahead before I lose my spotlight, this time avoiding genitals completely.

My next poem starts off loosely paraphrasing the lyrics to Metallica’s ‘Seek and Destroy’, mostly as a warm-up until my creative juices kick in. “My soul scans the scene in the city tonight,” I say. “Looking for sadness to start up a fight.” Then, right on cue, inspiration hits, and I manage to compose at least twenty minutes of powerful free verse before, predictably, I am again asked to stop.

“Are you making this up as you go?” Micronauts asks accusingly.

“What was all that stuff about the Holocaust not happening?” questions Tar-locks.

“I’ve called the police, dude,” says Sim-Jawline, returning to our group.

A Starbucks, it turns out, is a horrible place in which to wrestle with the police. The layout means you’re constantly bumping into things, and before you know it you’re being charged for destruction of property on top of assaulting an officer. Making lemons out of lemonade, I decide that I should at least win the fight – but the enemy of pugilism, the taser, soon enters the fracas, and darkness encloses me like Tar-locks’ cavernous vagina.

With bail posted I am back on the streets by nightfall, wiser than before and apt to avoid similar trappings in the future. First off: no more hippies. More importantly, though, I have decided to avoid public transit altogether, choosing to henceforth arrive at my various destinations the way God intended: grand theft auto. I have purchased a book on hotwiring, and am confident I’ll be able to master its execution before my next business meeting with whichever business I decide to visit next.