The Solemn Fool

The Song of the Solemn Fool in Winter

Spring is coiled under our feet
like a leopard stalking a deer
like a sleeping buck or a jumping jack sedated
soon to be elated
fêted. We fast to feast, we hunker on our haunches,
the sprinters and the amblers, the trippers and the victors
the dressed-as-jesters and the Fools who pay
a heavy price for fooling, scorning pay.

Yes, Fooling as an art demands
more than throwing custard tarts.
While pinstripe suits flash dollar signs
and social clans have each their kind
of uniform the fool just wears
a sign of contradiction. Stares.

The circus sells its tickets fast.
The jester prowls outside, outlasts
the clowning and the juggling. He growls
his rhyming lines, he sings and howls
and gives away his precious things
(too many spend lives haggling).
This jack leaves money in a ditch.

Unlicensed fool! He claims his pitch
outside the court. The king and priest
declare him of all men the least
but he just won’t stop scratching names
he gives himself, and Foolish claims,
and thirty thousand thousand words
on pavement, mud, and trampled turd.

Some stop and read, and throw a crust.
He sleeps on eiderdown or dust.
He lives on air or roasted beef,
on mushrooms, whisky, nettle leaf,
but whether warm or cold he writes
and whether he makes sense or bites
the hands that feed him he insists
he doesn’t care. Sober, pissed,
he bangs his tambourine, tin drum,
he writes on windows, doors; he hums
or bellows, chants, but words he spins
and spins and spins and spins and spins
a dizzying whirl of sound and thought
until infinity is naught
and words collapse, and silence rules.

And many, many, many Fools
are scribbling, singing, banging drums
until brown teeth drop out of gums.
And some will hear us, some will not
and some will laugh for few have got
the ears to hear the secret tune
singing between the lines. We Goons
can see what others can’t. Stand still
and listen. Look and feel. Be filled.

© Foolscap, 2024