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humor demands distance

by Gabriel Ricard


Comedy requires common sense hang.
Wit means painting all the soup cans blue.

She’s a rebel, rebel, (yeah, yeah),
and everyone is too uncomfortable
to disagree with her.

Her childhood took up seventy-nine separate acts.
Twenty-hour ballerina classes spent trying not to get pregnant.

She doesn’t write about it,
or about running Manhattan for ten full minutes,
so people tend to come by her circumstances naturally.

Hearing tragic stories by accident! Jesus! The horror!
Fuck yourself blind! Write a letter with a fistful of paint!

She wears her hair like Mabel Normand,
and only wears a coat when she’s half-sick to complete death
of keeping things to herself.

Wake up. Beg down. Buy some good weed
from the grief-stricken serial killer at the 7-11.5.

Visit South of the Border,
and then tell everybody that the situation in Mexico
is worse than anything they’ve seen or read.

She falls in love with semi-pro cult journalists,
steals their parents’ good vodka
and drinks it from the paper cups,
found in all agreeable hotel lobbies.

Blood-alcohol levels are for those who like a little science
to go with whether or not they torched a cop car.
If they might have married the bottom half of a horse costume.

Grocery shopping takes up hours of her airborne days.
She can still dance to the same five songs from “Born in The USA.”
She licks what’s left of the cashier from her fingers.
She robs fat kids with candy bars
pressed against the back of their wooden necks.

And her mental health has never been better.

The doctor is from the collapsed, detrimental old-school.
He smokes lights (whatever’s cheap)
and leaves the empty packages all over his office.

Pills are given in sealed envelopes,
but he throws in a few candy hearts
to prove he’s still got enough
of the actual muscle for the job.

She’s the only one who ever laughs at that,
because his usual clients are too busy
coming in through the bars on the windows to care.

Bake your loose screws into a pie, bring it to a cakewalk,
win the impromptu pie-throwing contest,
and then make an obvious joke to someone about life
not being as easy as they might have thought.

She paints the soup cans blue.
Demands love for fifteen minutes every hour.
Takes rubber bullets to the stomach in Oakland.

Shag ass to the train station in Springfield, VA,
and find eighty grand in unknown poker chips
in a Wal-Mart shopping bag.

Ask her about it, stupid.
She’ll just smile,
and take fifteen minutes of your life.
that you ain’t gonna get back.

It’s as good as capitalism is gonna get these days.

11/08/2011

Posted on 11/08/2011
Copyright © 2024 Gabriel Ricard

Member Comments on this Poem
Posted by Morgan D Hafele on 11/08/11 at 11:45 PM

sounds like 15 minutes is more than worth it.

Posted by Meghan Helmich on 11/09/11 at 12:30 AM

I don't know how you do it, but seeing it done makes me wish someone would write about me like that.

Posted by Kevin Fehlen on 11/09/11 at 04:27 AM

"Blood-alcohol levels are for those who like a little science to go with whether or not they torched a cop car. If they might have married the bottom half of a horse costume." -Love that!

Posted by Joe Cramer on 11/09/11 at 12:16 PM

... excellent....

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