clever humour who?
clever humour is really profound
grief with new feathers
now why did the chicken

old jokes give me
when propelled in my new blue suit
through blinding space and the luminescent
fuzz of stars
a reason to
and excuse me I must cough here
it’s not that I’m choked up on the brilliant
radiant fuzz of my narrative voice or
ontological speculation
oh now I’ve gone and let the cat out of the
and it’s creeping over the fence with my tongue
a ratty red thing that’s spoken of better days
that’s licked stamps of higher value
that’s been stuck on the doorknobs of
imanent people emanating from
doors under a cloak of darkness
a portmanteau of hush-hush mum’s-the-word clothing
a toque with infinite diameter yet
huge mass
no visible contents

I think it was Stephen Hawking
holding his styrofoam cup
early morning at the rink
the other physicists crashing against the boards
reasserting their bodies’ right to Newtonian physiques
and I should say
it was a large cup
a cup of coffee and the steam
rising
curling above him like the spectre of his own mortality
the phosphorescent tale of a stand-up comet heckling
our perfectly earnest planets and the stolid decency of our one sun
today playing goalie and the puck is accelerating
above even a puck’s ability to reassemble itself
from the slap and blur
the sun a victim of its own gravity
sucking the puck into the net
sending out long grief-stricken solar flares as yet
another point is scored
another chicken becomes radiant in the blue light of
the snowplow