You had canned laughter in your hair.
It accompanied everything you said,
drowning out the ends of your sentences,
your sentence ends.
I had had my sentence ends trimmed, tidied up so as
to cut down on my talking, which I told myself was
getting out of hand, and now I never got to the end of
sentences and no one understood what I was trying
to say.
I made phone calls and they came out garbled.
But I knew these were victorious conversations –
uselessly stupid, stupidly fruitless, fruitlessly weird,
weirdly important, dreams with dreamt-up punchlines,
mostly but not entirely jokeless.
Your hair laughed whenever you moved in your sleep,
soundtracking memories accumulated during the day –
our comedy situations that were awkwardly disastrous,
disastrously awkward, awkwardly disastrous,
disastrously awkward, ad infinitum, infinitum ad
Ric Carter
