Monday Poem

No Joke

Regarding quantum chance, why
(or more simply) does the world exist,
and if it does, is it funny?

There might just as well be nothing
instead of the risible sun which makes me laugh
when it comes up coincidentally
with the punch line of a joke
that also could never have existed
had some unknown condition
not brought a comedian to the point
of standing up during the cascading series
of events of a million million millennia
and, imagining the humorous potential of bars,
created stories of characters who might
walk into one:

tales of lives, fictional yes,
but which in consciousness ring clear and true
because they touch and plumb the essence of our
inexplicably absurd existence evoking laughter
as we continue our desperate mining of the void
which in a universe without mind would have been
forever cloaked, forever unknown to anyone,
leading to some nada impossibly mysterious
or moot
…………..   —no joke

Jim Culleny