Two Poems

Restoration Comedy

Turns out I didn’t love my time
as a groveling dog of the King’s court.
Excellent food, but in short supply.
Still, I never failed to make him laugh
with my one joke, until eventually
the mere sight of me would reduce him
to tears. Comedy was legal again.
Each world is built on top of the last.
Picture: Richard III buried beneath a parking lot.
Picture: us, gliding to our own demise
in vehicles powered by previous extinction.
It’s almost too perfect, the way the Lord,
with His pronounced irony,
forces treachery into such narrow straits.
I read that when the republic was through
and Charles II returned, everyone acted
like the last eleven years had never happened,
though they most definitely had.



There is a Person at your Front Door

The boys at the gun range are out again,
practicing for when the shit goes down.
Any clear evening you can hear them,
squeezing off rounds into the center mass
of some near future, leaving breezeways
in piles of paper men. Once, in Maine,
when I was miles away from another person,
I sat out on the porch of the rented cabin
and watched a spider add a strand to its web
inside a Tiffany lamp–watched it moving
so delicately across emerald panes of glass.
I thought, the only thing worse than being alone
out here would be seeing somebody. At home
I have a digital doorbell that alerts me
when people are near. All day it warns
“There is a Person at your Front Door”
and it’s my wife crossing the yard
with a water can, a child on a bike, a car
turning around in the driveway. Nothing
too unusual. Still, I would never turn around
in a stranger’s driveway. It’s almost insulting,
the presumption of it, that this is a safe place
when people get killed for a lot less.

____
Christopher Blackman lives in Norfolk, VA. His book of poems, Three-Day Weekend is available from Gunpowder Press.