Paula Cisewski
You think everyone knows
all about a thing so you don’t
write it down, don’t say.
Everybody does know
about it. It is difficult.
In the backs of our minds,
while several separate
groups of humans try
to entertain one another,
to be novel or bright,
a similar thought spider crouches.
Consider: the artist who was famously ironic
about being ironic. By each show’s end,
the whole audience felt stupid. We loved it!
But some of the crowd was only pretending,
you find out much later. It’s no wonder,
when even the family cat’s on
Prozac, we’re tired of emotion in art.
That antique sadness is the new
inside joke. It’s irrevocable, like when driving home
one night, the stranger who pulls up to the red light
next to you is weeping, both your windows
rolled up. You just begin to have a human reaction,
and then the light’s green.
AngelfromMontgomery et al. 