By Cameron Forest Crowell // Editor
I cried on the bus today reading the biography of Charles M Schulz.
Actually not even a biography,
I read his Wikipedia page.
Sometimes I think I am Charlie Brown,
I’m long and yellow and I don’t know why I’m sad.
Even my cat “has gone commercial,”
He only eats Science Diet and ornaments.
Charles M Schulz made a four-panel Peanuts comic everyday for fifty years,
With only one 5-day break around his 75th birthday.
He developed a hand tremor in 1980 and could only draw
If he held his right wrist in place with his left hand,
Yet he still ached out comics for the next twenty years.
I’ve always wanted to be Linus or Lucy,
They have it together.
Linus sits in a field waiting for the Great Pumpkin
And still vehemently believes when the pumpkin doesn’t come.
Then Lucy wakes up at 4am to tuck in her little brother so he doesn’t freeze.
I think that’s why she’s a psychiatrist. Not her Dad, or the piles of nickels.
Charles M Schulz retired in December of 1999.
When people asked if Charlie Brown would finally kick the football
He scoffed at the idea.
It would be a disservice to the series, he said.
A month after it ended he told an interviewer,
What a terrible thing it was that Charlie Brown never got to kick that ball.
What a sad and terrible thing it was for him to do.
Charles M Schulz died in February of 2000.
I was six years old, living in New Jersey
With my back to the hunter’s woods, quiet out of season.
Any memory I have is probably entirely fabricated,
But I swear it was snowing.
The following November my brother was born.
We didn’t have cable, but our antenna picked up ABC alright.
Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown must have been the first thing he saw.
[This poem was previously featured in the ‘Lewis & Clark Literature Review: XLIII’, an earlier draft was posted on the blog several months ago]
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