Once I had a friend,
I thought,
but really,
Pagliacci has no friends,
and that applies to all of us clowns,
even those of us who really can’t,
and oughtn’t try,
to pronounce “Pagliacci”.
And yet:
Perhaps I’m not cool enough to be a circuspunk,
an abstract take on a centuries-old attractions.
Perhaps I am,
and have always been,
a circus,
making the young and old both laugh and scream,
the ooddly delicious wind of buttery popcorn,
the stale beer which was once, and may it so be again,
spiked with cocaine.
Perhaps that’s why I’m too weird for them:
they like their attractions tame, and in cages,
and I never met a cage
which wanted to hold me
for more than perhaps an hour or two;
the distinguishing details of my life
are madness,
not locks.
