A Comedy of Marching Graves [R]

[Grady VanWright]

World of clinking coins and silent wails,
where sidewalks hum with the soft crush of heels,
everyone steps to their own dirge, unaware.
Oh, the tragic absurdity:
Mr. Bentley scowls at pigeons who dare
to shit on his new hat,
and Mrs. Cartwright spits venom at her grocer
for putting the tomatoes on top of the bread.

The city exhales smog, a heavy breath of gasoline
clings to children,
who tug at their mother’s skirts.
"Why does the sky taste like tin?"
But she only mutters, "Hush,"
eyes fixed on a glowing screen,
scrolling through new reasons
to fear strangers she’ll never meet.

The baker laughs too loud at the butcher’s joke—
not for its humor,
but to drown the gnaw of his empty belly,
a silence shared by the butcher, who thinks,
"At least it’s not my laugh that’s hollow."
In the corner, a rat nibbles on a crust of bread,
more content than any human in the room.

And yet, oh, how they dance,
how they twirl, spinning tighter into themselves.
The dance of indignation! The waltz of grievance!
"How dare she!"
"Can you believe they?"
An orchestra of finger-pointing plays on,
conducted by the maestro of misdirected rage.

Even love—wounded, gasping for air—
is bartered like a currency,
a whispered, "I’ll care if you care first."
But they don’t. Oh, they don’t.
Not for the child coughing in alley shadows,
not for the man sleeping beneath the ATM glow,
not for the widow watching reruns
in a house too quiet for ghosts.

Still, the comedy unfolds,
a clown stumbling forward,
his oversized shoes
dragging the weight of apathy.
The juggler fumbles his torches of outrage,
their sparks fading like forgotten convictions.
And the mime, ah, the mime!
Trapped in his invisible box of self-pity,
clawing at walls he cannot see.

And then, the sobering encore:
A quiet falls, deafening.
The laughter fades to a whisper of feet
marching, marching,
lockstep to the edge of their graves,
no applause, no encore.
Just the faint echo of a world
that never learned to love its own tragedy.

A clown sets down his nose.
A juggler lets the torches fall.
The mime cracks open his box.
And somewhere, someone—
maybe you, maybe me—
pauses,
and in that sacred, fleeting moment,
the sun brushes their face,
its warmth spilling across the silent distance,
illuminating what could have been.