Avid Buffoon

By Ethan (Randy) Choi

Art by Christian A. Vera

Ignorance is such a bore. Can’t you see that clown, as you wander down the city of dreams? Where’s the aspiration behind those puffy red lips and that bleached white skin? What's profound in your follies, where’s the thirst for grandeur? To every maestro is a wish to serenade the crowd, to every artist is a desire to craft perfection. What’s to you buffoon? 

Are your gag pies handcrafted? Did you tune your nose to play like a sax? Do your balloon animals speak to the MET sculptures at night? You frolic among the billions of sodium lights without intention. Laughing, laughing to the indifferent city; People don’t even look at you funny as you parade down the street, so why even dance a lick?

Those feathered pants and cheering crowds left with the circus long ago. Along the tracks of Manhattan, you’ll find nothing but lamented rats and aristocrats. This isn’t the court for talent like yours. It’s not a stage for American dreams or waffle houses. It was an estranged promise from this city, one of glitz and glamor. 

Is that what keeps your act going? An oblivious smile for fame? A million wisecracks about Citizen Kane, just to tell your name? Well I won’t say it here, not to this crowd. Not to the skyscrapers piercing the sky; Nor to the sunlight dipping its toes into the horizon. The residents of these boroughs, the passengers crammed in trains, the vagrants wandering the streets of bustling lights will never know of the clown who came.

But when those drapes closed… And the actors took off their masks... In that silence, there was still laughter. That cackle you let out, the one that never changed. It doesn’t bother you, does it? Not when crowds don’t notice you, not for your crooked walk or long-toed shoes. 

When those maestros strum their guitars in the dusty corners of crowded bars, and the artists splatter their souls unto canvases that sit untouched in galleries, their voices fell into the urban gutter, whispering waning prayers for salaries and muses to redefine their course.

When you wander off the streets, fading into the distance, and the last laugh echoes into nothingness. You still prance, because you set yourself a stage. A private theater where your absurdity congregates like loose Whitmen.  No, it never was for applause, nor for the laughter, not even for the wonders of New York, but purely and utterly because you, clown, 

found yourself so funny.