Quips and players, seeming to vend astringency off-hours,
celebrate diced excesses and sardonics, mixing pleasures,
as if proximity were staring at the margin of the plea
“It is important to begin when everything is already over… There were worse jokes his blood might have played on him. Its message might have read: All beginnings imply an apocalypse… He awoke the next morning tangled in first lines like wrinkled sheets.”
Robert Coover