Playbill

Here it comes, here it is, already in progress, the drama:

the drama in which the two-legged hero goes striding
stridingly across the littered town or the blue-carpeted
   library
toward a cool-hipped honor-bright bell-toned synthesis —

synthesis of hunting with nursing; of loins with love;
of Keats with Lincoln, Venus with Minerva, Chaplin with
   Emily Bronte;
of energy with elegy; the knife and the rose, hot traffic
and icy midnight:

I’m a star, I’m starring in it today, intrepid thespian
watched raptly by a packed audience of not-sure-who, elves
and cherubs maybe, the dead, the unmet, the haplessly
    betrayed

and also the Unknown Friend, the Ideal Sister,
all of them riveted, savoring the rampant ungovernable
   comedy
and every slightest ripple of dignity

in this long-running show starring me — or you —
we know we’re not the Original Cast; the ancient pocked
   street
is littered with sprightly playbills

for this drama: “Ephemerids Evanescing on One Small Planet”
where H2O happened to make possible turtles and Chaucer
yeah it can seem absurd but honey it’s the one drama playing
   in the Globe

of your head, my head, the one drama I care,
we care, inescapably about — therefore not to fall

sleepy in it, from it, not to sag stupid,
not to sink smoggy-fatalistic in the paralysis of
knowing every impulse has already been better acted on—
in the drama—it is a drama and must be PERFORMED

since nothing else is but the windy vapid silence
of the roofless foreclosed theatre in the dank dawn
after the last goofy flourished pompy heartseizing Act.