Didn’t Jokes Used to Be Funny?
after Louis MacNeice
Time was away, and somewhere else. Pied birds
hung like muted baubles in the trees,
the leaves of which were proof against the
Christmas breeze of that shocking December day’s
hour’s minute’s second. The word you will now
have forever chosen resting like an ice-cube
at half-melt on your red lower lip and I wondered slowly
where time had gone: off and elsewhere. Everything
suddenly had far too much detail; the stuff was pasted
crazily on, like glitter on a schoolkid’s Christmas project.
Christmas had come so early it passed
unnoticed, and the Christmas after
loomed like a punchline, and then you’re thinking
irrelevantly of shame, of what
a colossal fucking shame and that time was away
and somewhere unrecognizably else
had come rushing in to fill its place.