Owl Pelletry

It was conveniently intermission -

that glorified term for a potty break -
and my wife called
to see when I would be returning
from your poetry reading
and to inform me that my son
(having fallen asleep in the car
and thus
skipped his pre-sleep poop)
had recently rolled out of bed
and defecated on the floor.

I bade you and the other poet I heard

an urgent farewell,
laughingly recounting the anecdote
and confiding I'd probably be inspired
en route home
to write a poem about this incident.

You said, also laughingly,
that you'd like to read it.

I don't know if you were serious,

so I hope this doesn't stink,

this extrusion of my own orifice,

this log entry of my own experiences...
for I found upon driven consideration
that my son's performance
and my own poetry production
were cut from the same cloth,
woven of the same warp and weft

since they are

natural byproducts of the
physical and mental digestive processes
respectively.

But pondering this parallel
threw me askew into a perpendicular
train of thought:
Perhaps this penchant for propogating poetry
is more akin to the owl pellet than the child turdlet:

I mean, owls, like people, have means for excreting
that which they have digested,
having sucked all the nutrients out,
but owls also have a means for expelling
those substances which they have swallowed whole
and cannot digest (i.e., bones, fur, and the like).

And isn't that what this and many poems are -
regurgitations of undigested incidents,
things we haven't yet figured out how
to suck the meaningful nutrients from?

And some poor sap,
in some lab or classroom,
is left to dissect it,
noting the skeletons we've spewed
and inferring what they will
about our mental -
and sometimes physical -
diets.