Dichotomy

It's always bewildered me people asking me

As much as it has bewildered the people asking me apparently

The question in actuality is simpler than it seems on the surface

How is it that I make jokes and poetry in the same breath of a rather measured existence?

I find it rather amusing that

It amuses you to not realise the similarities as obvious as they are

What are we but pimps

Of measured words and loaned silences

The poet and the comedian are quite the same recipe really

Sprinkled in sarcasm and laced in caustic cynicism that burns you with a nagging aftertaste

I tell a poem

And people listen, because poetry is for the polite

And as words fight their way into the dead weight of sheepish souls

Their clattering claps and behaved beings with their pretended sophistications nod in nicety

I tell a joke

And people listen, because jokes are a legitimate excuse to take offense

And as some lips rupture and the stained teeth show up in sadistic laughters 

Many more assholes clench hard, tighter than the grip of reluctance, their sweaty pretenses and rusty beliefs scared they would be rattled

And you see, I am, what they call a greedy motherfucker

I want the subtle and the whiplash, the tickles and the punches, the bruises and the bloodshed

Watch it all burn as the pretentious mascara of agreement falls off the dark circles of dissent

The dichotomy of comforting the uncomfortable and discomforting the comfortable, all at the distance of a few words

And as the curses and the abuses line up higher than a stack of match-sticks waiting to be lit in the hopes they would burn my words to the ground

I smile, a wide wild grin, from ear to ear, because, guess who really won?