God, being the earliest known satirist, laughed at what the only star, constructed half for his amusement, half for light, so he could find his slippers by the bedside, had said.
A bit of dark matter from dinner fell from between his teeth, tumbled out beyond his reach, to form the famed cell which in its inertia would eventually split into the Vermont County Fair, the Boston Common, a universally understood etiquette for panhandling, the lake of used-up light bulbs, mall kiosks where on Saturday afternoons battery salesmen accost us with lifelong promises of fidelity, the old man and his wife who rifle through our trash at dusk in a tipsy drizzle for glass bottles and the money we threw away, the blizzard and the steam rising from pizzeria windows like practice chariots drawn not-quite-right by entry-level angels . . .
In the wake of its inertia, weaving our particular strand of a doomed but delightful web, that cell made tonight’s moon, neither waxing nor waning, a half-crescent hemmed by a laggard rain-cloud that can’t shove off and get its life together, mourns the eventuality of its own passing.
Through the making of the cloud, the perpetually put-upon moon, that meteoric cell, burning, mourns the eventuality of its own passing and petering out, and God, being the longest living satirist, laughs.
Brian Le Lay‘s first full-length book of poems, Don’t Bury Me in New Jersey, is available from Electric Windmill Books. His second book, Smile for the Customers, is forthcoming from Brass Seahorse Books. Recent poems have appeared in Hobo Pancakes, The Rusty Nail, and Gutter Eloquence. He blogs athttp://www.conceiveyourself.blogspot.com