Life At the Speed of Groucho
It took you eighty years, more,
to live it, and the facts
are sketchy, clipped as they are
from the script of your life.
I wonder about the texture
of your bald head, the smell
of your greasepaint moustache.
It took me a couple of weeks
between calls at work, a
page or two in the evening,
to run thru the stats,
get the wives, daughters,
mother straight, but Groucho,
Julius, twenty years after you
wheezed your last crack,
(a nurse looking for your
temperature was teased with,
"Don't be silly; everybody
has a temperature...") your true
walk will never be clear, how
your black eyes rolled over
this same white way at the
start of the last hundred block,
A doctor?
Minnie knew better. Your meds
wouldn't fit in a bottle,
ills of the world better served
by a Hackenbush, a Spaulding,
a Groucho ready to spring,
ducked into low crouch out
of Establishment's way,
clawhammer coat prying the dust
from Edwardian minds,
Groucho at the mic,
and the secret word is
CAR 8/5/01
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