from The Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999 – BUY THE BOOK
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LEDGELIFE
The taller the monument, the more impatient our luggage. Look, look, a graveyard has fancy dirt.
Historians agree: this is the pebble which beaned Goliath.
Every billboard is theoretically as beautiful as what lies unseen behind it.
Mouth: the word’s exit-wound.
It is impossible to run away face-to-face.
Shadow has closed the door out of you to you, but not to us.
The sign on the wall advises: Hide your gloves beneath your wings.
Even sculptors occasionally lean against statues.
Migrations?! Fate?! Life swears up at ledgelife.
All the sad tantamounts gather. They want, they say, to errand our ways.
Please aim all kicks at the ground.
Address all blows to the air.
We are to be barely mentioned if at all in the moon’s memoirs.
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MINOR POEM
The only response
to a child’s grave is
to lie down before it and play dead
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CASTRATION ENVY #11
Tying the pimp in dreams to a lamppost
His tuxedo wet with wheedled kisses, can
I wake up sucking the footprints of toilets
In jails that glitter like crash-dived marquees.
A dog appears in call letters on my skin.
Twin worlds, who exchange threats via scoreboard
I rival this night, this fight to the death
With enough leftover, ooze for twosies yet.
Either even, I wish I could put on take off
My clothes without first saying to my cock
“Excuse me, is this yours,” while the stars
The collected no-shows of eternity, rise.
Hey, remember the way painters gauge perspective?
Me, I cut the thumb off and throw it at stuff.
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ADVICE FROM THE EXPERTS
I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter’s curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don’t, don’t jump.
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THE MISUNDERSTANDING
I’m charmed yet chagrined by this misunderstanding–
As when, after a riot, my city’s smashed-in stores appear all
Boarded up, billboarded over, with ads for wind-insurance.
Similarly, swimmingly, I miss the point. You too?
And my misunderstanding doesn’t stop there, it grows–soon
I can’t see why that sudden influx of fugitives,
All the world’s escapees, rubbing themselves lasciviously against the
Berlin Wall.
They stick like placards to it. Like napalm. Like ads for–
And me, I haven’t even bought my biodegradable genitalia yet!
No. I was born slow, but picking up speed I run through
Our burnt-out streets, screaming, refusing to buy a house.
Finally, exasperated, the misunderstanding overtakes me, snatches
up
Handcuffs. So now here I am, found with all you others
Impatiently craning, in this queue that rumors out of sight up ahead
somewhere,
Clutching our cash eager to purchase whatever it is, nervous
As if bombs were about to practice land-reform upon our bodies,
Redistribution of eyes, toes, arms, here we stand. Then, some new
Age starts.
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ANCIENT MEASURES
As much as someone could plow in one day
They called an acre;
As much as a person could die in one instant
A lifetime–
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MONOPOLY
Finally the day dawned when a monopoly owned everything in the
world
So it went looking for its stockholders to celebrate
But they were all owned by it they were all dead they were
someplace
Their photographs hung in elevators which went up and down up and
down carrying nobody
Everyone else was in bed doing exercises to get in shape for noon
Hey the monopoly said let’s uncork the World Trade Center and get
blotto
Silence
The monopoly scowled
All it wanted was a little good-fellowship, like you get in the
highrise apartment-buildings
Then the sky got awful dark
Gee
And everyone was in bed frantically doing those exercises that get us in
shape for death
Exercises known as “kissing” “fucking” “caressing”
Everyone was unaware that they had been bought
Or that the earth was about to sell them to the moon
For a little light
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© 2000 Bill Knott, from The Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969-1999,
BOA Editions Ltd. Reproduced by permission. May not be reproduced without permission.