There was a joke I was going to write, a really good joke, but I have forgotten it. A shame, now all that’s left is the television blaring in front of me, sounds of “The Price is Right” shoveling through my ears and a contestant that looks a little too suspiciously like Tupac is shouting and jumping at having won... something?

I don’t know,
I’m not following the show,
nor do I really understand the rules.
Just another sensation
white-noising itself through my head
before it is different again
and the moment is different again
and I remember it differently again.

New contestant, this time Biggie Smalls.
Same dance different shout. Same apathetic response.
New moment,
new seconds on the clock.
This time,
I turn off the t.v.
and I get up and walk
to the other side of the room,
pick up the sleeping bag
that swallows my work
without complaint
but without compliment as well,
and I straighten my back
and then a new joke is revealed to me
from the recesses of my mind,
an abstraction strung together
by an invisible pattern, method, rule,
to come out as a joke
that I tell to the bag.

“The reason why they call it the Price is Right
is because it costs so much to pay attention.”

I tell the joke to no audience,
to no credible person in the room,
but I hear the bag laughing
and then the day was ready to begin
and I step outside
to the warm welcome of the wind
and blink my eyes twice
and find that
I’m on the set of the television show
that I tried to turn off
and I can’t leave. I can never leave.

Now I’m dancing and shouting in glorious praise,
because I remember my original joke and realize that
as a result of my diligence and tough-living,
I’ve been rewarded with the absurdity of everyday living
and everyday dying. That was the joke all along.
But this time, there's a audience behind me,
laughing and clapping at my spontaneous and illogical display.
Because they are stuck there too. We were all stuck there.
That was our cost.