The Stand-Up Comic’s Plea for Sympathy
Robert Allen
May 8, 2022
“Granted, the history of comedy
is vast,” my brother says while spotty rain
keeps attempting to fall on both our heads
during our Wednesday morning walk, “but how
many more trains can fit inside Grand Central?”
A question which reminds me of the fact
that in thirty years our world will be covered
in concrete, our glaciers, both poles of ice,
not to mention our polar bears and salmon
will be gone, people far apart will turn
into vegetarians because there simply
will be no space, or grass, on which to graze
our cattle, and we will live underground
in dimly lit enormous rooms with tubes
along the sides where we will feed, and tubes
along the other side where we will—“Hey
didn’t this conversation go south quickly?”
my brother asks as a drop of rain falls
in his eye.
Now we grow weary of walking,
and the walls, which hitherto have kept out
the sea, begin to crack, and the bleak thought,
unspoken between us, that the whole crazy
human race will go extinct in another
seven-hundred-sixty-eight full years, flatly
gives neither one of us much comfort. Then
comes the simultaneous realization
that the comedians of our future planet
will never be at a loss for material.
We stare at each other, eye to wet eye,
buds for all eternity, and the sun
gets off these stinging one-liners, real beauties
they are, while the trains keep coming and going
through Grand Central, never stopping for bears,
lost fish, or lowly cows. At which point nothing
keeps either one of us decrepit, neck-deep
fools from launching into a monologue
no one will be alive to listen to
except, perhaps, the much maligned and surly
cockroach, or the occasionally hapless
spider, neither one of which seems to lend
a leg-hair while we stand next to our cars,
contemplating the climate of our days.
At length, my tired brother can joke no more,
and with cause to cry I’m dying up here
he begins, instead, to describe a world
which is not dying but is constantly
being renewed, where the children of Eve
and Adam learn to live and die together,
the sun’s soft light is filtered by the right
amount of clouds, the rain drops willingly,
and the trains, those filthy trains—here he falters,
wants to say they will be gone, will reduce
their rolling number to allow more space
for living things, but nothing is that simple.
“If only humankind knew how to leave
this stand-up world a better place. Remove
the plastic from the sea, let salmon lose
their Alzheimer’s and gain their memory.
Stop using trains and planes and cars to burn
those fossil fuels, the polar bears can keep
some solid ground. Feel the earth’s pain,” he sighs,
a sigh so dark he smiles, then drives away—
so cold I dream my car goes up in flame.
Robert Allen is retired and lives in San Antonio with his wife, two children, five antique clocks, and five cats. He has poems in Voices de la Luna, the Texas Poetry Calendar, Writers Take a Walk, and Poetry on the Move. He co-facilitates Gemini Ink's Open Writer's Lab.
