Meaning of Life #31

by Sean Lovelace

"All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl."

                                                                        Charlie Chaplin

Here is a park.  Bread crusts.  Rock doves.  Serpentine paths; the shrubberies of June.  And the sun either shines, or all the world is under hypnotism.  A cruise missile coughs its way overhead.  This is not the first park of surveillance.  The first nostalgic for days of cola wars, drug wars—oh that Georgian age of laughter.  Here comes a policeman.  Dizzy.  His face slow-motion, speech warbling.  Three things we know for sure, he sobs, shaking his finger at a low place / a large place / a place where all the unclaimed yellow of the world curls into a ball, licks its wounds, and dies.  There is a body back there.  And I can't remember the last time I climbed a tree.  The temperature plummets; an evening turns from gold to lead.  Hanging smoke, smog.  What about the third thing? the rock doves coo.  A draft, a tornado siren.  A girl hurls past—solitary, wide-eyed, pretty—on a bicycle built for two.