This day in history:
wars, fires, plane crashes.
This poem.
Molly Parker is born. John Quelch dies
hanged (he was a pirate).
This year: it's Corvette Day (the sports car)
Social Media Day (ha)
National Watch Day (as in wristwatch,
not spectator) (I think.)
and International Asteroid Day
(not the sports car, rather, rocks
in space).
The savvy
gentleman, being no help,
will trick
food into the pan
and wait for freezing
snow to melt
rather than melt
the snow. The savvy
gentleman is freezing
to death. Help!
He would pan
for gold rather than trick
’r treat, or trick
’n’ cheat, melt
the gold down, and pan-
handle like a savvy
traveler, never asking for help,
even when freezing
to death. The ol’ freezing
to death trick.
Help!
It will melt
the heart of the most savvy
cynic, like Zamfir, master of the pan
flute. (The pan
flute, so cool it’s freezing,
chick-magnet of savvy
hipsters. Not.) It’s no trick
to melt
hearts on a help
line for self-help
addicts if you’re a pan-
like god. Will snow melt
hearts, freezing
unprovoked? Will early spring trick
the savvy
gentleman, eating a tuna melt? God help
us all, both the savvy and the pan-cake-eating,
freezing-yogurt-eating,
and other trick-food-eating masses.
I claimed to be all out of tears,
though I’m sure I’d just heard that phrase somewhere
and thought it sounded hardboiled. Like
something a detective would say to a beautiful woman
who is not impressed. And still, I was sad,
but not sad so much as resigned to the whims of clowns.
I claimed to be whole. But that was a front, in clowns’
makeup, a fake-out, a mask with drawn-on tears.
In reality, I was far from sad.
In reality, I was off somewhere,
looking for a home, looking for the woman
with whom I was in love, and who I didn’t even like.
That’s not true, either. In fact, I was nothing like
a man in love—and much more akin to a clown’s
saggy ass. And in truth, the reason was a woman.
I think. Though it was really hard to see through the tears,
to see the horizon of perspective, off somewhere
beyond the edge of town, at the intersection of desperate and sad.
By noon the next day I was tired of this sad
sack complaining, and I resigned myself to act like
a grownup, over lunch somewhere
expensive, and then coffee, at the place clowns
go to die, drowning in their own tears.
All of this to impress a woman!
Had I been a woman,
I’d have been repulsed by this sad
posturing—the artificial tears
and unconvincing tales of woe. Like
a bar where only clowns
drink, acting like nowhere is somewhere.
I wanted to go somewhere
else, somewhere new, with the woman
of my dreams—not a nightmare filled with clowns.
I wanted to be through with this sad
life, and reengage like a butterfly, like
a cloud, like a rainbow sprung from God’s tears.
You clowns! I know you’re hiding somewhere,
behind your tears, behind the love of a woman,
where happy is sad. But we’re all alike.
