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When I woke up the next morning on my living room couch it was almost noon. But I was hangover-free. Then my happy buzz was thrown for a loop when I realized that half the napkins from last night were missing – including all the poems that got read out loud on the microphone. There was some good shit in there, too. Also among the missing: all the napkins from bowl #1, i.e., the titles waiting for a poet. Plus most, if not all, of the bowl #3 poems – the stuff people liked best.

I don’t get it. I made it home with all of 37 poems. From the buzz around our Barstool Poetry table, it seemed like there were twice that many barstool poems written Saturday night, easily.

And I have no idea what happened to the rest of them.

Luckily, there were several in the surviving batch of 37 that I liked. Like this haiku.

Still, I’m pretty bummed about not having those missing napkins. Not only were there many quality poems in the mix. But by not having ALL the poems that got written, I don’t have an accurate gauge on how involved the crowd truly was. While the evening certainly passed the eye test, I was eager to see if I went home with more than 74 poems, our highest one-night Barstool Poetry haul yet at one of these events. Now it appears I’ll never be sure.

So how does one lose 35+ poem-soaked cocktail napkins?

Well . . . just before the clock struck 2 a.m. and the bar closed down, I left my Barstool Poetry command post and took a short walk around the corner to have a smoke and a chat with a newly converted barstool poet I met earlier in the night and his friend, who told us about his time working in a small Austin office with fellow IT security man Edward Snowden.

By the time I made it back to the Violet Crown, the staff had gathered my things – including our 3 bowls full of poem-drenched napkins – and left them inside by the bar. When I glanced into the glass fishbowl, which now seemed to carry all the night’s napkins,  it looked a little light on poems. I could’ve sworn we collected more poems than that, I thought to myself. But it was late, the staff looked like they were ready to head out and I was too wasted to do anything more than drag my stuff – bowls, books, napkins, pens and a pair of foam core-mounted Barstool Poetry posters – out to the curb to look for a cab.