A Regular Guy

He's a regular guy
With regular clothes
Regular eyes
Regular nose
Six normal fingers
Six normal toes
He's ten-foot-eleven
As most would suppose

His head is all neck
And the top is dried noodles
Boring plain features
We've all seen in oodles

He's typical
Common
With elephant ears
A mustache of yarn
Like all of his peers

His lips are blue-spotted
Like people you know
And three teeth is plenty
For a regular Joe

He tries not to notice
When folks have ten digits
Or how short they are
As six-foot-tall midgets

A round head is shocking
And try as he might
He can't ignore hair there
It doesn't look right

With more than three teeth
A face seems quite flawed
He tries not to stare
But, man!
YOU look odd


-B.C. Byron

When I present my poetry and drawings in schools, kids often comment on the fact that my characters have an inconsistent number of fingers and toes. Some people in my illustrations have 4 fingers and toes, some have 5, and some even have a different number of fingers than toes. When asked about it by 7 year old boy, I told him it’s to make little kids wonder and ask questions. It works well for that. Probably drives them nuts. Honestly, I’m not really sure why I end up drawing characters that way, but now it’s a part of what makes my art style and I don’t think I’ll change it. When you’re extremely not-famous like me, a signature style is important to maintain, and you can get away with nutty things like that. Gotta’ give my fans what they want and expect (by fans, I mean my parents, some of my siblings, and one guy I work with).

In situations like this poem presents, I’ve often heard someone say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That seems rather painful. I hate it when a bit of dirt or other tiny debris gets in my eye. Squirting water on it makes my eye hurt worse and rarely gets the junk out. I’ve tried the trick of pulling the upper eyelid down over the lower eyelid, then the grain of crud gets stuck on my inner eyelid and finds its way back onto my eyeball in seconds. I’ve tried blinking furiously. That just chafes mybey faster. Bad experience. Beautiful things are generally bigger than specks of dirt. I don’t want beauty to get in my eye. Also, I’m not really sure how that phrase is relevant to weird-looking people considering normal people to be the odd ones.

I suppose it’s possible that the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” actually means that physical beauty is merely a preference based on features we’re used to seeing. When someone looks vastly different from our everyday encounters, it’s important to remember that. As the super hairy-chest-and-back guy in the locker room at my gym told his mockers, “hey, where I come from, you look like wimpy, hairless freaks.” I don’t know if the folks from his hometown are all covered front and back with bushy fur, but he makes a great point. It’s usually all about what we’re accustomed to. TV and social media posts often reinforce those preferences. It’s not bad at all to find beauty in the everyday people and things that surround us, but we can learn to find beauty in some things we’re NOT used to seeing as well.