Pastiche
I was reading a little John Ashbery tonight. It's been awhile. Then, I wrote this poem.
Pastiche
- to John Ashbery
Suddenly there appears a cliff before me.
Why hadn’t I seen it sooner?
The soups are too rich these days
when the clocks have all decided
to tell the same time and
some man in a lab coat is finally
going on holiday.
Murder only counts if
someone misses you.
There is little humor left these days.
Only the doors, in an as yet
undecipherable ancient wooden language
tell good knock-knock jokes anymore.
The wind is howling and bundling
itself up, in a tumbleweed fashion.
I do hope we’ll all still be able to breathe
or at least suddenly grow gills and
slither back to where we came from.
The wine tonight
is teaching me how to
put words together so that only
the stuff that matters is heard.
I’m glad for that, until I
suddenly remember leaving
my teeth in a jar
in my last hotel room.
The wall calendar these days
is flapping around
in the still night’s air
and making a fuss
about something or other.
I’m besides myself, always lost
in the second person.
The cliff face is gone.
There is now only
a clown’s before me
laughing at
and with
my pastiche ways.