A Poem by Thomas Day

Andy Kaufman Live

let’s play Risk (R.E.M.)

That little bit of real that hangs in the air
as you lip-sync the Mighty Mouse line,
the situation slightly out of hand –

strung out in first-night nervous song.
Coughing on Letterman as if the lung
cancer had already budded, you corpse.

Don’t laugh, you say in a wounded
voice, you’re not trying to be funny.
Then you ask for money.

You relive the TV of your youth:
Howdy Doody wows the grown-up kids
after years of mouldering in a box –

he shows us what he looks like folded up.
And there you are, in miniature, in your open
casket, strings still visible, mask askew.

No one really believes you didn’t
die, but when Foreign Man mangles
a shaggy dog story – do you understand? –

we do.

Thomas Day is an English teacher. He has published critical essays and reviews in Essays in Criticism, The Cambridge Quarterly, PN Review, the TLS, and others, and has had poems published in Agenda, Ink Sweat & Tears, English in Education, and The Ekphrastic Review.