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I subscribe to an internet entity called “Poem of the Day,” which provides me each a.m. with a dollop of verse to go along with a cup of whatever ground coffee is on sale at Harris Teeter on the previous Senior Citizen Discount Thursday.

This morning’s poem, Copyright © 2025 by Jessica Abughattas, has a title guaranteed to perk the interest of anyone interested in verse. It’s called “Failed Poems.” It’s one of those works where the title serves as the subject of the first sentence. To wit:

            Failed Poems

            will crawl out of the drain and try to kill you
            like some 80s horror flick.^[1]

I like the poem, its witty catalogue of unpleasant analogies. Bad poems are like “a black widow creeping/from the mound of linens still warm from our bodies.”  They “steal your breath/ when you wake parched, hungover, emptied,” etc.

What really caught my attention, being a fake artist and all, were these lines describing another, much more successful fake artist:

Once, in Zurich, we were served rabbit paella at a party 
celebrating an exhibition of an artist from Venice Beach 
who used to be homeless but drinks $25 Erewhon smoothies and paints 
hundreds maybe thousands of happy faces with his feet. His canvasses 
go for $25,000. Toe paintings are better or at least significantly 
more profitable than failed poems.

This really hit home because the day before yesterday I got a text from a number I didn’t recognize with this message:

“Found some ‘fake’ art at goodwill today. I’m going to buy it as an investment.”

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I responded, “Who in his right mind would give a masterpiece like that away?”

But to be honest, I did know. It was the fellow who won it at Chico Feo’s annual Canine Halloween Costume Contest. Harlan, the organizer, asked if I would donate a print, and I thought it was one of the better prizes, but as luck would have it, the winner is an actual artist who upon receiving it asked me if I’d seen any of his works.  

I hadn’t.

But I’ll also admit it would take a certain, rare art lover with a funkadelic sensibility maximus to want to hang the print above the mantle.

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Anyway, the poet nails it when she whines about the unprofitability of writing poems vis-à-vis creating pictural art. In fact, believe it or not, despite receiving a rave review from Kirkus Reviews and having appeared on a local television show and several national podcasts, my novel Today, Oh Boy has provided me with less income than my fake paintings.^[2]

Already this month, I’ve received two commissions and sold another print, not including the secondhand Good Will purchase. 

Anyway, I’d say that creating these canvases is more fun that writing fiction and certainly more fun that going over the “corrected proofs” of a manuscript that soon will be bound and sold in bookstores and online, which I have been doing of late.

I don’t  have a pub date yet for Long Ago Last Summer, but I’m guessing late spring or early summer.

PS. Speaking of commissions, Caroline and I have commissioned the unfake funkadelic artist Thom Piragnoli to create a sign for our driveway to alert visitors where our hidden house hides. 

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You can check out Thom’s art at Chico Feo. The one above is called Galaxy Gals. Check out this LINK for more on Thom. 

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^[1] Rather than cutting and pasting the entire poem, I’ll provide a link because non-poetry lovers, i.e., 99.97% of people, would abandon this post for the greener pastures of a TikTok video. Here’s the LINK. You can read along while Jessica Abughattas reads it in a rather pleasant regionless accent.

^[2] To be honest, this was not the case in 2023, the year Today, Oh Boy was published.