Laughing Cult: Poems

By Kevin McCaffrey

Inspired by the spirit and approach of Bertolt Brecht's Manual of Piety, the poems of Laughing Cult often employ the structures of ballads, folksongs, and other traditional forms to create miniature sketches marked by romantic ambiguity, occultism, science fiction, and quirky angst. As cool in tone as a Lee Konitz solo and as lacking in affect as pop art, this first collection includes numerous poems that have appeared on the Exquisite Corpse website. To shape something aesthetically charged out of the spent elements and enervated thoughts of a slowly failing society: that's the challenge Laughing Cult has set for itself. These are two-dimensional poems for a one-dimensional age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Four Winds Press
• Release date: Apr 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940423012

Kevin McCaffrey

Kevin McCaffrey is a former McKinsey consultant. He led enterprise strategy, operations, and new business ventures at T-Mobile and Google. He is now a partner at Rossman Partners.

Book preview

Dinner with dad

What does the coyote want to do with his life?

—Isabel Schimmers, Conquering the Badlands with Magic

It was the usual dinner with the usual questions

but when my daughter’s new boyfriend told me

that, after college, he wanted to become a life

coach—a fucking consultant—to wild

animals, I had to restrain myself

from getting up wordlessly and walking

out. I could see my daughter’s wariness,

watching me, watching him, for familiar signs

that something was going to go down like those unavoidable

days when the material and mystical worlds

rearrange themselves in their hallucinated games

of musical spheres. But I stayed on, molding

my face into a grimace-free visage,

bidding my passions to heel like dogs,

and asked this young Lothario how

he’d do what hadn’t been done before,

at least so far as I remembered, excepting

for the sake of argument Orpheus and Francis

of Assisi as being the only two I knew

who’d done some similar shit with animals

and such. He countered with a life-strategy of

writing his own job description, following

his bliss, and maybe interning at a zoo or Sea-

World and then trekking into the wild like that dude

in the movie . . . where his ass starved in the end?

I butted in and he looked confused, then smiled, meek,

nodding yes, until my daughter, sleek,

moved in to rescue him like she’d rescued me

countless times before in the bad

old days, so I relented and the dinner

moved on and went just fine, I mean

as fine as these awkward dinners can go.

Chute

My wife and son have left the house for a while,

how long they’ll be gone I don’t know—

the house is as still as my empty mind;

it takes on a shadowy glow.

Ticking clock and refrigerator hum—

these are the muted sounds I hear.

I have nothing to say to anyone.

Funny how that becomes more clear.

This basement is where I spend my time.

I like it because it is cool,

yet I use the hours when they are gone

to climb up through the laundry chute

to the lived-in rooms above my pit

where I can watch a little t.v.

and grab myself a beer, a snack, some chips—

feeling remnants of memories.

They flicker by, these memories—they glow

like particles of dust in light.

I can become transfixed by every mote,

dwell in diminishing delight

until my son and wife come bickering home,

then I descend, leaving scant trace

that I have pushed aside the spectral stone

once more to take my rightful place.

Sometimes they pause by the basement door

and gaze into the blackness here,

but both are reluctant to come below

to see who might have moved the chair

in the living room so slightly, or switched

the often broken toaster on.

Though there is no thief where there is no theft,

they are wary of my return.

I’ll stay away from dallying

It is like being halfway from the summer

house to the winter house and remembering

you’ve left the bongo drums