Life Isn’t a Beanbag

I am reading a book of jokes

that looks like a book of poems

double-spaced typing, plenty of white space,

400 pages long.

almost unheard of unless it’s a ‘Collected’

& it’s by a comedian,

the comedian of comedians — Seinfeld

and it’s been 25 years in the making

so you’d think something with heft

like a comic ‘Crime & Punishment’, for instance.

Look, I wasn’t expecting Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor

but this stuff was tame, kindergarten, Christmas cracker

material, vanilla, timid as marshmallow.

What I wanted to ask was:

where are the pangs, the pricks, the pranks

life has played on you? the prangs of relationships?

Your life couldn’t have been that cushiony, surely?

Life isn’t a beanbag, Jerry. Where is the dark matter?

All I’m saying is, you coulda done better.

After 25 years of  nothing in print,

you coulda done better, Jerry. Will you give me that?

the Red Wheelbarrow & Frankenstein

It’s the little things I love

Like watching

 ‘Paterson’, the movie

About the bus driver

Who wrote his little epiphanies in his note book

like William Carlos Williams

the doctor who wrote

the red wheelbarrow

And finding out

That’s where Lou Costello grew up,

Paterson, New Jersey

There’s even a park named after him,

Lou Costello the chubby comedian who played alongside Bud Abbot,

The straight guy.

I used to watch those guys in the funhouse

Of the fifties,

Frolicking with Frankenstein and The Wolf man.

But it was Lou Costello

I loved

The funny little fat guy

And that’s where he came from,

Paterson, New Jersey.