Laugh Junkie

Buster Keaton broke his neck to get a laugh out of me

I am a laugh junkie

without sympathy

I think he got off easy

I know the feeling

I constantly crave the sound of making people laugh

though my love of laughter is so selfish

so I get no such rush hearing laughter inspired by other people

like an alcoholic watching another drink

he can think what the other feels after so many drinks

but he cannot feel how it feels to be drunk unless he is good and drunk

drunk for an alcoholic is sober for the rest of us

with practice even the most dimwitted can learn to be a functioning alcoholic

meaning he’s under the influence of alcohol most of the time

meaning he can get by at activities the rest of us would find impossible to try

after so many beers

like walking, talking, drinking

leaving me thinking nothing except I should be thinking about what not to be thinking

this puppy dog chasing its tail

after awhile

you start to root for the puppy

“Come on, puppy! Catch your tail!”

Let’s say the puppy catches his own tail

then what?

Face first into this stream of consciousness

currents carrying me past the bodies of dead memories that bob up and down

so old and water logged

that I can’t even see

what they used to mean to me

could be comedy could be tragedy

they could mean anything

all I know is what I used to believe

is now make believe

and what I used to see as hazy

looking at the horizon dissecting the sky and the sea

on the hottest of summer days

and I trust my eyes less than I can throw them

knowing the horizon is not really swimming in the heat

that the horizon doesn’t even exist

it is just a fine line traced by this mind

these lies my eyes devise

to parallel truth

and even dreams seem real

some times realer than a reel of reality

shining upon a real movie screen

where we laugh at the man falling down

not standing up.

It Just Looks Abstract

Amazing how so little paint can change so much

when you learn when it was painted.

I have an abstract painting on my wall

that is not abstract at all when you know

it was painted September 11th, 2001

then you see the impact against the World Trade Center

and suddenly abstract has lost all its meaning

and you become me

and tragedy becomes beauty

even when you don’t want it to be

when you were there

8:46 a.m Tuesday September 11, 2001

stepping on to the Brooklyn Bridge

and you see the first plane hit the tower and you still went walking to work

this paining is no longer splattered by paint

but blood

in veins of cold blue paint

and you can’t look away

remembering how you’d seen the first plane as an accident

and it wasn’t until seeing the second plane hitting the second tower

that you saw the meaning of the first

and turned back for the bridge

to take you across the river

to take you home

to turn on the tv

to give meaning to what you’d just seen

and you don’t see the millions of pixels spinning in frenzied looms

to sow reality together

from fabric shredded by the Big Bang’s bloom.