Walter Bargen: Vaudeville Visigoths

The first couple in a cartoon bed on prime time television

was Fred and Wilma Flintstone. All Fred could yell was,

“Yabba dabba do!” We didn’t see anything more except Wilma

pulling a leg bone from her high-stacked bouffant.

Their darker progenitors, Ralph and Alice Kramden, in the 50’s

sitcom, The Honeymooners, their apartment kitchen their living room,

their launching pad, when Ralph clinched a fist and spit,

BANG, ZOOM! Straight to the moon, Alice

In our own sketches of animated desires, destitute and desperate,

we are free to jump off cliffs, slap each other against walls,

chase through one door and be chased out the other,

pursuit and escape, our bodies’ fields

for the game of kick and punch compromise. We are easy prey

for the human-sized rat traps, dynamite exploding in our mouths,

falling through loose boards in the porch, tumbling through

missing manhole covers,

the slammed door molded to our faces, and, finally, to capitulate

to the string of careening insults. We redraw our lives, erase

the purple bruises, sharpen our pencils for the next night

of comic strip lives.

Copyright 2016 Walter Bargen

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