Comedy

La vie serait une comédie bien agréable, si l’on n’y jouait pas un rôle. / Life would make great theater, were it not that one plays a role in it.—Denis Diderot (1713–84)

My own role in it is not to shoot the seagull

Or chop down the orchard, Chekhov said.

I get a thousand roubles for a play is all.

And something tells me that I’ll soon be dead.

I, too, play a subsidiary role—"the poet."

No one gives a tinker's dam(n) for what I think.

I do my best to make the viewers blink,

But there's no future in it, don’t I know't!

November 18, 2024