A/n- we read the Canterbury Tales and had to write our own story!

Disclaimer: Don't own CT

Summary: A poet tells a meaningful tale of a boy to inspire truth and justice in his audience.

Prologue

My mother was a widow, having married before my father; her husband dying and leaving her childless. Instead, she married an older man, settled down in New Jersey, as a housewife. The man she married, my father. He was a banker; a keen man, whose little girl would become his pride and joy and whose business would be passed down to his daughter, a first for his testosterone-ridden family.

Imagine my parents surprise when the received me, a boy, blackened hair far from the flaxen they had expected and dreamt of since my conception. The only sign I was their child were my eyes, nose, and stature; for my father had a pale blue gaze and a tall whip like body and my mother a pert, upturned way about her face.

Once they got a good look at me, the name Nicole was tossed by the way side- instead, Nicholas. October 13; and there I sat.

Now, you may be wondering; if such a proud man as Jonathan Marie had given his title and wealth to his only son, why then is the son dressed in a manor such as this? Rags to riches; only in my case, it went a little backwards.

Forget numbers; forget the suit and tie; I wanted poetry- lines of liquid amber and silver stretching far from my fingertips, wrapping in thick bands of soundless pleasure around the world. Words whose colors spilled like shimmering ink upon the desk, staining it with harsh murmurings and deeply gouging whispers. Pens which, when resting neatly against my fingertips, hum, sounding a tightly wound chorus of nervous jitters and barely-contained excitement over the blank page of white before me. And that white of the page. Like an endlessness whose beauty called for me to mar; the starkness a song from which I could not escape. I wanted to kill it; that emptiness.

Yet, it was not only the poetry of words that destroyed me, birthing me anew.

I wanted to live by the ocean, to wake to its thrashing against the shore in a perpetual suicide which left me breathless. To golf with only a bent stick and a smooth river rock I had collected on the day’s previous hike up to the cold mountains, my lungs ragged and my body aching from the strain of the world on my sinew.

I wanted and wanted and wished and wished and found myself not living my almost tangible illusions, but a year out of high school with no career, no money, and my father damning me for my inability to do was he asked of me.

The bank went to my cousin.

And one day, nearly three years ago, as my father lay buried in the town cemetery, as my mother remarried, and as the Bank flourished, then failed, then flourished again, I realized that there, stuck in Wheaton New Jersey, I was nobody. Worse- for in other places I could too be a nobody, but there I was nobody and not even relishing in it.

I left.

Now, Apartment 15, bottom floor, two rooms to my name, Port Town Washington; I am still a nobody, but I do with my life what I will- that usually consisting of massive amounts of tar- black caffeine and pancakes, every morning, for it is the only sustenance I can afford.

Why now, surrounded with fellows of the same situation; either running away from their lives or running to some impossible dream, should I be the one to win this competition?

Shall I cut the others down? No, for they may have just a need as I have to be here. It is not for me to decide who is worthy of any kind of honor.

Shall I speak flattering words? Pander to the crowds? No, for those words will probably be false and, frankly, I can think of no such flattery that wouldn’t leave me with thick thistles of deceit weighing on my palate.

My tale will, by its own power, speak to you.

Tell you who I am and what I value almost as highly as the poetry which drives me.

My tale will, in simple words, persuade you.

For, I certainly can do no such task.