Birth of Comedy (Max Ernst), Sonnet #295

All are dropped, but do all have a mother?
What wicked womb, illicit phantasm,
Bore forth the stick of laughter's orgasm,
Only to be deliriously smothered
(Unless the comedic had no parent,
Is thoroughly a bastardo, arrant,
A prancer in sexless harlequin pants).
The world's worst gag, he offers as a gift:
A statue of a man biting off a hen's head
Has a crack. Put your hand in there, fall dead.
The moral? "Beware of geeks bearing rifts."
The Eden apple was the world's first joke.
The last will be "water and fire make smoke."
Oh, Comedy, you old world-burdened moke.

The Undone Thing

My body's naked decay
illuminates a room of mirrors,

themselves reflections, years
compressed into a backward look.

That was flat bone, that, my eye,
that, hard skin, sharp spine.

As number shapes itself,
a man gradually freezes

into the markless prism
of each day: One. Attention!

Two. Prayer! Three. Reach out!
Thus, the count approximates me.

The caliper and the scale
exact a shade of difference

between mole and carcinoma-
sensations bought and sold:

a faceless, Ernstian torso,
odalisque sans ottoman,

beckons like blue oblivion;
afloat in a dusty tearpool

with feathers, stone, and pigment
peeled from unsized canvas,

she is the life of reclining truth,
with plump breasts pointing up.

The seductions of flounder
stall when fins touch glass;

untentacled jellyfish loom
out of the clouds of sand

the moment our quotidian fate,
the miracle of food, descends.