• Come, spritz of seltzer in the face,
• implacable banana peel.
• Come, brickbats, pratfalls, amazing grace-
• lessness, the yowl of the schlemiel.
• Away with wit, you clever flights
• of phrase it takes a Ph.D.
• to explicate. One good food fight’s
• worth fifty Oscar Wildes to me.
• A can of paint on Keaton’s head,
• another on his foot: what bliss,
• God bless the doofuses who spread
• the net he manages to miss.
• Come, whoopee cushions, slamming doors.
• Come, bops and jabs and spit-takes sprayed
• on brides by grooms with falling drawers,
• O heaven of the seventh grade!
• No sadism this, no black desire,
• just Larry, Moe, and Curly’s woes,
• the thousand gouges that conspire
• to make the milk come out my nose.
• Come, O pie-faced end: feet glued to
• the floor, my tie caught in the gears,
• the audience in stitches who
• can’t help but laugh themselves to tears.

Roy Mash is a longtime board member of Marin Poetry Center. He holds degrees in English, philosophy, and computer science, though he claims that he currently doodles his time away staring out of café windows, dabbing up the seeds that have fallen from an everything bagel and mentally thumbing over his poems that have appeared widely in journals such as AGNI, Atlanta Review, Barrow Street, The Evansville Review, Nimrod, Passages North, Poetry East, RHINO, and River Styx. His first full-length book, Buyer’s Remorse (Cherry Grove Collections), was published in 2014.