Why are they Laughing

​Speaking relentlessly and swarming a supposed poetry
reading with improvised speech, the poet, the vastly
anthologized poet, the translated poet, the objectively
considered poet must have thought he reminded them of
Becket and Creely with his constant interrogation of the
limits of his own work, and his attempts to dissolve the
line between who he is as a writer and who he is as
a human being, distancing himself from both
vagueness and accuracy by means of biography
in order to show the immense weight of his poetic
purpose and mentioning fighting, wrestling and war
stories, things to which everyone can relate to, if not form
direct experience certainly from films, and television and
the all-pervasive spurious looking, because everything,
everything has been discussed already and approached in
an attempt to bridge this dark deep distance between
them, and that he has only accentuated this unconquerable
loneliness through words, by making them
remember, that every single one of those words he says
has been there before him, in a parasitic existence that
changes them, the ephemeral hosts, and that they cannot see
​or understand with these imperfect tools something as
simple as his blue, in a poem about how it is too late now,
but once, once, he could have left this permanent
circumstance behind, he could have bought a convertible
and put his life in someone else’s hands under a burnished
sentimental blue sky, once… if only for one second and
when they’re laughing, and they will be laughing, it is because
it is the only thing between being silent and saying something.

Published in Bare Fiction - Issue 9