don't put turnips in your pockets

i found my old high-school locker in the woods.
it smelled liked greasy metal.
i just kind of stumbled onto it.
i knew right away it was my old high-school locker.
i'm not really sure exactly how i knew it
was my old high-school locker at first sight.
but i just knew.
it was gray, and had "breathing slots" near the
top.
then, of course, my old latin iii textbook with
my name in it proved beyond all doubt that
this was the locker that had belonged to me.
there was a gooey layer all over everything.
from the smell, i realized it was cum.
at first i thought it was my own cum,
spurted when i was a teenage boy.
and then i decided it was the cum
of lots of different teenage boys,
my own included,
spurted onto the outside of my locker,
and
into my locker,
just absolutely
drenching everything in my locker
with teenage-boy cum.
the smell of all that teenage-boy cum,
that,
and the smell of greasy metal,
made
me feel strange.
the latin iii textbook felt kind of tacky.
i'm 59 years old now.
it was a quiet day in the woods,
not even a breeze,
just the sound of pine needles crackling
under foot,
and that discovery of my old high-school locker.
actually,
i found the whole thing pretty exciting,
the smell of all that teenage-boy cum,
the general oddness of the situation.
when i sat down and started translating the latin,
i was surprised just how much latin i remembered,
more than you'd think, and
surprised by just
how much metal could smell like grease,
how much teenage-boy cum could smell like greasy metal,
and how
long it took
to read one line of vergil,
while
the oozing of time burned the inside of
my throat.

--Carl Miller Daniels (This is an excerpt from my book String Bean, published by BareBackPress in March 2018. "don't put turnips in your pockets" first appeared in My Favorite Bullet, Volume 11, issue 1, January 2012.)