Rotmouth Manifesto
Rotmouth drew up the manifesto
on a paper bag,
at two in the morning,
in a booth with a coffee and a drag
of something that he probably should not have been smoking,
and wrote the whole philosophy of what he saw as joking.
I
The truth is funnier than the lie.
II
The audience is smarter than the sky.
III
The bit that scares you
is the bit worth doing.
IV
The room will know exactly
what you’re pursuing.
V
The darkness earns the right to be expressed.
VI
The laugh that costs you something
is the best.
VII
Never do the bit you did last year.
VIII
The bit that fails
is still worth keeping near.
He folded up the manifesto and he lost it in the road,
somewhere between Columbus and the weight of the full load,
and rebuilt it from memory a hundred times since then,
and every time he writes it it’s slightly different again.
Every word of it is true in ways he’d never planned.
Wrinkled. Stained. Ragged.
Written with a shaking hand.