The Failure of Irony

After $150 and eleven minutes, she ended
Our appointment with this,
"Blah, blah, blah, garden-variety, severe depression."

Garden-variety, severe depression?
My nuclear blast-sized relief must have been evident,
On my napalm-melted expression.
She patted my shoulder in an encouraging manner,
But from a "don't-touch-the-leper" distance.

My radiation-soaked thankfulness expressed,
I calmly walked to the trailer-park-in-a-tornado protection of my truck,
Secure in my bullet-ridden, pandemic-torn sense of self.
The ground-zero-devastation of my previous typhoon-swamping state
Had been atomically-leveled
By her world-destroying clinical prowess.

This was turning into some Armageddon!

Driving on, I saw an old friend who I waved
To with a firebombing sincerity worthy of Dresden
Or maybe Tokyo. He didn't wave back,
And as deathbed-rattling luck would have it, my truck
Somehow found its way to a turnaround
Of biblical plague proportions.
What a hanging-from-the-gallows perspective I now had!
When I clipped my friend with the front bumper,
I had a minefield-contracting-from-the-cold-like moment of clarity,
My friend simply hadn't seen me!
He wasn't nursing an aggressively-necrotizing-fasciitis grudge against me.
He was simply Nagasaki-in August-blinded from view of me.
As soon as the "Oh my God, I've never seen so much blood" EMS team
Arrived on the scene, I thanked and stepped over him,
Making an arrow-through the-heart bee-line
To my doctor's office to tell her the good news
About her stultifying genius.

Larry S. Lafferty

If you've any comments on this poem, Larry S. Lafferty would be pleased to hear from you.