The Bric-a-Brac of Mickey Mack by Mickey Mack
Poetry /Comedy Satire Gift Rhyme Millennial Humor Silverstein Memory
Date Published: 04-15-2026
Publisher: The Tink and Tank Press
About the Book:
A wry poetry collection that captures the jarring sink-or-swim leap into
adulthood. This book honors the limbo of exiting youth, a unique period where
responsibility suddenly smashes the youthful optimist, crushing it under the
crippling weight of adulthood. Twenty-somethings scatter across life's
spectrum with some jobless and couch-surfing, while others marry, become
parents, and buy a house. Everyone eventually finds themselves old enough to
fight in foreign wars but too young to rent a car. It's the fast, brutal shift
to an unguarded world, to bowling without bumpers. You've entered a chaotic
soup of competing ambitions and subterfuge, where one hand offers help while
the other conceals a knife. You're expected to be an adult without ever having
been one, like seeing the ocean from afar and suddenly wrestling its waves.
This book highlights the inevitable sense of crushing defeat and loss, but
reveals the importance of laughing anyway. After all, life is a game of
avoiding the consequences of your own actions. The Bric-a-Brac of Mickey Mack
will hand you a mirror and dare you to laugh at its reflection.
Read an Excerpt:
I sat across from him, he had a twisted distant gaze
while he wracked his mind and grappled with a foolish phrase
which was written on a note and shuffled in a mess of junk
atop a desk ensconced in filth, no doubt the man was drunk.
His name was Mickey Mack, both laser focused and aloof,
fenced in by Bric-a-Brac unpacked and stacked up to the roof.
A product of his times, so wise, yet dumber than a door.
A man of vast experience and yet he’s such a bore.
He’d traveled ’round the world and been to many foreign lands
to simply say he had, to sit and sulk, his only plans.
For “that’s what people do,” he’d say, “they travel to enjoy
the petty world and what it offers every girl and boy.”
Despite the fact that Mr. Mack had traveled far and wide
he would do what’s done at home and find a bar to sit inside.
And there, while many past him by, bemoaning life itself,
it tortured Mickey for he couldn’t help but see himself.
He realized now that time is gone, and that’s the way it is,
and he, while living other people’s lives, had wasted his.
And as a way, as best he could, expel the toxic bile,
he has compiled every groan and gripe within a file.
And written down, at last, now put together in a book
the crying whines of all he heard from all the trips he took.
A vapid, superficial twit, he sobered up somehow,
and Mickey Mack looked up at me behind a furrowed brow,
and as he squinted, leaning closer straining hard to see,
He was looking in a mirror, for the hopeless fool was me.
About the Author:
Mickey Mack is a world-weary traveler and obsessive collector of
life’s absurd talismans and trinkets. After years of eavesdropping on
bar-stool confessions around the globe, he distills the Suffering Olympics of
modern adulthood into witty, rhythmic heroic couplets.
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