But not funny like comix or a dog
kvetching, neither funny
like funambulism nor the town carnival where
for three dollars you can sledgehammer a car,
not Beckett's ashcan through which heads
come up, Keaton with the barrelgrinder's
monkey funny, that funny
silence called an ex, a sex pot, sextodecimo
pages torn from a book, not the broken
then fixed lit cigarette trick, monkey
editing a folio or happy trails, happy
hunting, hapless jack in the box pulpit,
neither this is the world's smallest violin,
as a return to reality implies no new acceptances,
playing to the tune of: didn't he have a loincloth over
his gentiles, figure of the self reduced
to that of a fly on the orator's brow,
nor funny car, funny bone, funny farm
where Simple Simon went a poaching
for to shoot some game, and the trap
and pain effect: schlemiel, schlep,
it makes me delirious this erectile dysfunction
and I cannot hold the umpteenth sexual position
as suggested in the tantric manual,
having entered language for a peep
and found the licking of toes an essential kind of seduction,
not the gang in soldered chains, brass
or black japanned dreaming of torsos in lace and whalebone,
not Humpty Dumpty, portmanteau, portamento,
that uninterrupted passing from one tone to another,
then to the axis where trivialities hover and buzz,
dog running, run that is dogging, some of us
soon to be immortal due to other sleights of hand,
and not the opium poppy, the juice of which is an original
source where some wise ones take suck,
like one Thomas De Quincey divining
the doctrine of the true church on the subject of opium,
and S. T. Coleridge whose initials intoned very quickly
are ecstasy: L'éclat, c'est moi: what the hardy laugh
screens us from, what fetches up the bawdy jest for this earth
uncanny, like a philosopher with a thousand eyes,
out and out defying things to feel.
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