WHAT IS FUNNY?

There’s a man standing before an open window, 37 storeys up. He’s wearing a Groucho nose and glasses. On the ground, like the open mouth of a tiny frog, a bowlful of water awaits him.

His feet are normal. He wears large red shoes.

Someone has replaced his left eyeball with his right, his right testicle with his left, has replaced his skinny arms with wings.

On the horizon, a cream pie rises amid fleshy pink clouds. These are everyday materials and we are oh so very tired.

*

I didn't know this:

In The Tin Woodman of Oz, Nick Chopper (the Tin Woodman) finally sets out to find his lost love, Nimmie Amee, but discovers that she has already married a man constructed partly out of his own discarded limbs. For the Tin Woodman, this encounter with his former fiancée is almost as jarring as his experiences being transformed into a tin owl, meeting another tin man, and conversing with his ill-tempered original head. (see here for more.)

And thus (though I'm not sure if the ending is too pat for me.)

THE WOOD TINMAN

ax enchanted it cuts

off bits of

my body one

by

one: left leg, arm, ear, test

icle

right ear, nost

ril,

leg, fingers, head

each replaced with its self

made of tin

later I meet the flesh

girl who I was going to marry

but she’s already married all my cut

parts together

my doleful empty torso a hollow

clang

I wish I were of wood

the jigsaw of myself

the sudden flame of being

a single image

solved

*

OUTLAW REVOLUTION CAPTAIN

In the days before Marco Polo discovered the Miniature Doberman here on Planet of the Tired Clown, the Unconventional Creeps Race began at noon instead of one. I was drunk log before that playing the jigsaw snapping race with my lost woodman brother. What kind of death satin sailor sails the piping North Pole with nothing but a random rabbi generator beneath his cap? I’m an impossible planet circled by the weepy noses of my dream detonators. Mice wish themselves twenty legs then begin a new life of scurrying. Don’t we all.