The wake—his brother standing in the kitchen
and me leaning close with the stitching
of the joke he would have appreciated,
the dark bit, the calibrated
wrong-time punchline for the right-time room,
and his brother laughed in the gloom
of the kitchen of the dead man’s house—
and we were both alive. The loudspeaker.
Dark joke in a dark room—the necessary
laugh, the contemporary
grace of the terrible funny.
The dark joke: the money
of the still-here in the worst hour.
Dark joke in a dark room: my power
to acknowledge the bad thing on two
sides at once. Dark joke: true.
You laugh because it’s honest—
the dark joke is the modest
acknowledgment of the terrible
and also: comedic. The terrible
is terrible and also
the absurdity below
the surface, visible from the exact
wrong angle. The dark joke: fact.
I make them at the worst times—
the clinical waiting room, the rhymes
of the two-AM hospital.
The dark funny: the surgical
laugh that nobody prescribed.
The dark humor: inscribed
in the still-here, still-breathing.
The dark joke in the dark room: living.