A few years ago, I self-published a satire thriller called No Rhyme Goes Unpunished under the pen name Quentin Banks. It’s about how someone is killing the worst poets in L.A. and homicide detective Henry Cake is trying to stop them — even though nobody wants him to.

Here’s a quick outtake. Cake goes undercover as an emo poet to catch the killer at a poetry venue. Here he is delivering his first poem. Beside him is a goth girl he’s falling for.

Uh…

It was dark that night

We found the dead woman

Lying on the street

With her eyes open

Staring…at…the stars

She had lines on her arms

And bruises on her legs

I wondered if she’d had

Any family

A home

What her name was

But we never knew

What the heck happened

Just that someone

Probably didn’t pay

The piper on time

Meaning

The pipe person

You know

The guy who sells

Illegal stuff no one should

Be smoking

He gave them all a stern look, realized he’d just totally fallen out of character, and then slipped back into his fugue.

Uh…

Except cool people of course

Don’t get me wrong

And this woman paid all right

Paid with her life

One less star in the sky

One less light at night

Fallen from above

Lying on the ground

Like litter.

He paused, wincing at the truth of what he was saying, then added:

I’ve seen too much trash.

He put the microphone back on the stand and strode off the stage as the coffee crowd went bananas. Loud “Yeeeeaahs!” soared through the cloud of noise. All Cake saw was the look on Fuchsia’s face as he approached the couch: sheer surprise widened her eyes, her mouth slightly agape. It was the look that perps sometimes had when they realized they’d been caught fair and square while they were being handcuffed. 

“How’d I do?” he asked quietly.

“Did you just make that up?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow!” She planted a kiss on his cheek.

He grinned. The pink-haired girl was still looking at him. Crap! Did she recognize him? This was not good. He averted his eyes and flattened his smile until her coffee house fervor was re-ignited and she turned her attention fully to the roster at hand. They heard one poet after another — mostly bad although occasionally someone crept up to the microphone and read something that made Cake’s skin tingle. His hand moved closer to Fuchsia’s until he clasped it. Her delicate fingers clapsed back. He felt foolish worrying about whether or not a woman who’d tied him up and had sex with him twice liked him but he’d never met anyone like her before. Most women he’d dated were a bit passive, wanting an alpha male, which Cake wasn’t. Fuchsia’s general forthrightness turned him on.