The Clown
- Janet Frame
His face is streaked with prepared tears.
I, with others, applaud him, knowing it
is fashionable to approve when a clown cries
and to disapprove when a persistent sour face
does whether or not his tears are paint.
It is also fashionable, between wars,
to say that hate is love and love is hate,
to make out everything is more complex than we dreamed
and then to say we did not dream it,
we knew it all along and are wise.
Dear crying clown dear childlike man
dear kind murderer dear innocent guilty
dear simplicity I hate you for making me pretend
there are several worlds to one truth when
I know, I know there are not. Dear people like you and me
whose breaths are bad, who sleep in and rumble
their bowels and control it until
they get home into the empty house or among the family
dear family, dear lonely man in torn world of nobody,
is it for this waste that we have hoarded words over so many
million years since the first, groan,
and look up at the stars. Oh oh the sky is too wide to sleep under!
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