September included my first immersion into a comedy festival. I was surrounded by other comics for just over one week, so I got more of a sense of the mindset and motivation of dozens of people who endeavor to go onto a stage and attempt to elicit laughter out of people they have never met. We also attempted new comedic art forms, like RiffaPalooza, where 30 comics individually spent 2 minutes riffing on the last comics material and 1 minute of their own work for the next comedian to riff off of.

The result was as intriguing and joyful as a good theater production.

The most memorable experience of all for me was working on the same bill with a disabled comic from Denver whom I had met 5 or 6 years ago and have wanted to share a bill with her ever since. When I got on stage, I informed the audience that I have been crippled for almost ½ of my life, but she has been crippled her entire life, so expect her material to be much darker than mine. My humor is geared to the exterior world; hers is geared to her interior world and therefore was much darker than mine. We are both “differently funnied.”

I still continue to write poetry. This is a recent effort.

PRESERVATION OF MEMORY

The opaque sleeve drifts by night,
as sacrosanct as an escaped dream,
screams heard from behind a cloud,
where the mounting servitude of envy

looks tired, like a grandfather’s passion,
the sweet sauce that rings the solar system,
time like the soft flitter of sorrow,
hidden like a magnetic magician.

The lonely edge of a computer generated tonic,
a stick that runs away, returning as a wand,
the cork that closes up the world,
a single sip that exposes the “all in all”

When voices echo like tiny eggs,
silence seeps among us, like the gratitude of giants.