Oh, The Hilarity

Front’s non-comedy stylings are piling up.
This must be the fifth one, like I’m just some punk-
ass non-clown not here to amuse you.
You’re free to hit stop, go get high and watch Blue’s Clues.
I got loose screws in my Comed-O-Matic at the moment.
The fun-fun truck is stuck in the parking lot doing donuts.
And though cuts by Front oft times cause ha-has unequaled,
ain’t nothing funny about 250,000 drowned people.

How I wish there were! The rhymes could unfurl apace.
Instead, I’m eking every syllable out, an ungeeklike doubt in the grace
of my brainstem. Pen to the pad: clumsy.
Six weeks since I sat dumbly,
watched the numbers go up like the odometer on a Formula One,
doubled in every headline as I fed my un-
drowned first-world self another breakfast.
Imagining to have a life not even wrecked, just
washed away clean, set out to ocean.
Kids who coveted stranded fish caught in the motion
of an unstable planet and its swiftly tilting seashores.
Pardon if the rhyme’s a little free-form.
And I ain’t been reborn lately, but I may be someday,
like two hundred and fifty thousand souls radioing mayday.

And imagine them all coming back at once:
a legion of newborns with wet eyes placing trust
in mainlands, mountains, and landlocked states,
keenly aware of potential repetitions of fate.
This adumbrated by the wobble in the womb,
ever sorrowful at the notion of a typhoon,
ever gleeful as a tree-full of dry leaf falls down
to land un-dampened, soft and still on the ground
(we’re still on the ground).

So look, I like making humor. I poke fun at tumors.
All the people that my government tortures, it ain’t rumors,
it’s comedy gold! And I’m old hand around the gallows.
All the jokes I crack are callous and callow,
and shallow and in poor taste.
But I can’t seem to summon that up today.
Might say all’s fair in despair and upheaval,
but there ain’t nothing funny about 250,000 drowned people.