Alan Sincic

"It [juggling] takes a long time to learn ... and when you work and work and work on a trick you find when you are perfect that it does not go well with the audience, and all the trouble has been for nothing. It is the comparatively simple trick that goes down well. The harder the act the less it seems to be appreciated." [From W.C. Fields: By Himself]

Where W.C. Fields Slept

When at Twelve Years of Age

He Got His Ass Kicked Out Of The House

In a barrel stuffed with newspaper.

On burlap tacked to a stolen door in a potato field

curled to the steel knob like a doorman

with no good hotel to justify the hard hours

and small, and wiping his nose, and uncommitted.

Fastened to a frail dome of stars

and dropped each night a commando

into piles of broken cabbage. Nudged by a cop.

Propped to a fence-board to thaw his morning body out,

glad for sun the wood traps,

calculating the white air and his own round breath,

ice in the trees instead of smoked meat

and no applause from Jesus and his saints.

Crazy sleep. On a pool table.

On wallpaper stacks in the john of a heated saloon.

In a baptistery (you can look it up)

lined with police gazettes look it up. Cold

it made him into a funny kid.

In a lean-to a smithy's roof supports

collapsed with his loud coat off

having all night practiced an impossible show business act

and gesture of revenge on the world of idiot objects

having juggled a deck of cards

worked up from three to a paper fountain

crazy, crazy, mad to be admired

and fierce for the warm floorboards

to turn bread for the world's best juggler.

Crazy crazy rich at last

in pressed pajamas

he tiptoes to a mansion closet

and fingers the soft hinges of eighty-two fresh sheets,

installs a barber's chair in the den

hires a masseuse

wires orange umbrellas to a lawn-chair

and pays a secretary to make rain from a garden hose.

Makes you wonder what cop or burglar dogged him,

what odd road hummed through his bones while he slept

or made tense journey of each short dream

like a man groggy at the wheel of a fast car

flinches and wakes. How to figure it

W.C. asleep in a barber's chair

or with a sprinkler above his head. On a pool table.

Under a vaporizer laced with whiskey.

Inside a washtub. In a wood-box.

On a trunk. In a

hole in the ground. In a hole

in the ground. He was a funny man.