A Lump of Grape Jelly Drops to My Khakis

Poem, Reaper Madness 1 Minute

A lump of grape jelly drops to my khakis
with much marriage-wrecking fanfare.
I’m left to ruminate again: should I have run faster?
Reached with greater fervor?
Strived? Striven? Gamboled?
I may not have ascended to captainhood of any industry,
may not even then have lunched with Jamie Dimon
or Diamond Lil,
or Lou Diamond Phillips starring as
nervous flyer Ritchie Valens,
but it seems less likely
that I would have landed
under this spotlit, inexpertly spackled
little proscenium,
where at the potholed intersection
of choice and raw fortune
off-brand jelly slides like an uncut ruby
out of a lumpen PB and J,
and thence unto my unironed khakis.
In another life! Under another sun!
I shall have pushed harder, lunged more longingly,
shall have raced with greater abandon
toward Gatsby’s green light,
danced with Mia Farrow
and been noisily shot to death in a swimming pool.
Well. When you put it that way.

Published by jef

The blood thrumming around the still-point of this light headache can be traced back to the first rain. That is, our blood just sort of drifts, like smoke, through time; with stops in the Cambrian, the Renaissance and so on. It’s an impenetrable, infinitely-layered heap of unknowing. Okay? (sighs) Yeah The World (as it’s called) is a hopeless lucid dream, but not the kind where you can leap off a building, flap your arms and take joyous id-flight. It’s the kind where you show up for just long enough to see yourself in a mirror and Know that You are Here. That apparently necessary bit of business having been addressed, thermodynamics or some other such fancy idiot enters with a tea towel over its forearm, takes you politely by the gnarled elbow and ushers you back into the soil, where the mostly irritating Circle of Life awaits to make of you a tree, then a shoebox, then wet mush in a landfill again. Bring me my slippers! Oh…never mind. But I’m not here to philosophishizzle. We’re doomed animals at the momentary top of a food chain of no eternal consequence. It feels like. That’s not meant to be a downer. Bacharach sprang from the Ur-ooze, so that recommends the place. Let us celebrate our moment in the hum de dum dum de dum de de de dum dum.

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