w/ an arrow to the head

what attracts me to beckett's, tom beckett's great uncle sam beckett, work is not just it's minimalism but the fact that the old irish writer turned french author knew that no matter how fucked up we are in relation to ourselves, our society, nature, the universer and our inner-lives, no matter how weird and strange it gets, the going is still very funny. so when i posted that heaney quote a couple days ago about summoning a post-beckettian poetics i did so because i recalled the frisson of energy felt when i first ran across it back in the day when i was a younger poet and very much enthrall to heaney's early works.

life is funny. sometimes the joke is on us. thus tonight after picking up nicholas from daycare and walking the mile home in 100 plus f. heat, a walk that took two hours because of nicholas's propensity to stop and admire or stomp on every leaf, examine every crack in the sidewalk, investigate each insect, i was soaking wet from sweating and somewhat in a cranky mood. anna had the day off and had dinner waiting for us. nicholas was in dire need of a bath and rather than bore the shit out of you with further description of my minor domestic details i'll say that nicholas and i watched a movie, zathura: a space adventure [2005], a charming feature about two boys who play an intergalactic game with some wild consequences and directed by jon favreau.

afterward, setting our boy to bed he tells anna and i that he stuffed a bead in his ear. huh? we look. sure enough there's a ball of something jammed deep in nicholas's ear canal. i don't know. i kind of freaked out. anna was much cooler and tried sluicing it out with water. no go. so i get on the phone to the advice nurse and nervously pace the house with the phone to my ear as i waited. what can you do. the nurse laughed, said it was better than getting something stuck in his nose and now we have an appointment tomorrow morning for the doctor to remove what nicholas tells us is a bead. we can see the damn thing. it's pretty deep.

which is pretty funny in retrospect. a typical four-year-old act. nicholas told us that he was playing with the bead and stuffed it into his ear today at daycare but told no one about it. now i'm calming down. we go to the hospital directly across the street from cal expo, the site of the california state fair that opened today. we are going to the fair tomorrow night.

is there a poem, or line of verse, that might encapsulate the life of a quickly approaching middle-aged poet with a young son who freaked his parents out by stuffing a rubber ball in his ear? might be the stuff of stand-up comedy, which i think is closely related to poetry. i can't think of nothing but perhaps i should get an arrow thru the head as if life is indeed a stage and i'm merely the court jester. oh shit, i nearly quoted the old band rush's song 'the limelight'. god help us all.

oh what the hell: