The teller’s goal to induce laughter, his 

insular resolve, does not impact the

goodness (my reading of the goodness of

my good intentions [whenever citing

“good intentions” I’m only amending

a lack of intention in retrospect,

a sort of reflex dissembling or

garnishing my benign ambivalence]

matters only inasmuch as it forms

a model: what I might hope to convince 

Robyn that my intentions, opaquely 

equivocal, must have been) of the joke;  

   and laughter’s not so easy to refute

   nor drown in obfuscation later on.

My friend Iggy “just [couldn’t] understand” 

how I couldn’t be dating somebody,

and to inspire me, and/or out of 

genuine confusion, pointed to Ben,

a mutual friend who, for example,

despite so much less “to work with” dated

“Julia” (his emphasis). Julia;

what a strange assertion: I considered 

Ben to have much more “to work with” than I:

More handsome, fit, funny, etcetera. 

And what’s more, I considered Julia 

pleasant but basically unattractive, 

and had puzzled over why Ben dated

someone whose league he was so far out of.

Invitations to “the party” come late

if at all, tangle in speculative 

networks of recrimination, ingrown 

fatalism, that one must either be

or bring a child to defer, rather 

to conceptualize last words besides 

inconsequential last words; winnowing 

to uselessness, the decisive estate

of bar soap; this and each pulsing moment

a lamentation for its own passage. 

Mortality practice, for those of us

who’ve relinquished little or less; votive 

chaos to ratify in advance just

how inconvenient the gathering hurt.