Tonight's Poet Corner: He Coughed Streamers

He Coughed Streamers
by Belinda Roddie

He was a party assembly man,
a goofball, a confetti buffoon,
a clown who wasn't really a clown,
but he carried enough red and blue
balloons to fill his house twice over
(and they all fit into the pockets of
his gray carpenter jeans).

Since his twenty-seventh
birthday, he had popped out of
forty-nine birthday cakes:
for family, for friends, for politicians,
even for his own wife's fiftieth.
She loved it, kissed him so hard that
she sucked away patches of frosting from his
cheeks and nose. Delicious.

And the man couldn't help it. Firecrackers
lit up his blood. Ribbons and bows
coiled around each tendon that sprung wired
like the lights of a Christmas tree.
Merlot made his cheeks red and
turkey made his belly rumble with
music. He was a happy rambunctious soul,
and people loved him. So much so that
when doctors discovered from his autopsy
that he had swallowed seven rolls of purple
tissue streamers, we laughed instead of cried.