Hardened to experience
Like gum beneath a chair,
I cannot explain
This lasting hunger for simple fictions.

Yet prompt me as you tried so long ago
To imitate the joker in the balcony
Who shouts “I’m gonna be sick!”
And launches a bucketful of mushroom soup
Over the railing,
To this day I forget my only line.  
The gestures, too.  
And the sound effects?  
The mind’s ear can’t hear them anymore,
Let alone vibrate to them in Sensurround.

But I’m still slouching down in familiar dark,
Feet stuck to the floor, waiting for the previews to end,
Hoping that a moving picture conjures
Something whose absence has become
So powerful that I begin to think
It’s really the presence of something else.

The aroma of our time together
So many years ago lingers
Like the faint odor of mushroom soup.