National Championship
This is the game for all the marbles
Everyone tunes in and watches until the end
The victor gets every single marble
Which must be carried out by hand.
One player, the captain, the hero—take your pick
Is selected to be the marble bearer.
If he drops a single marble
The laugh track kicks in
But it’s an audio loop of walruses giggling
And no one knows what it means.
The studio hosts, retired linebackers
Or whatever, stuffed into designer suits,
Act like they don’t see it
And go back to telestrating how
To make enormous piles of money
Without doing anything meaningful at all.
No one seems to care about the marble
So he drops the rest of them
And shotguns a beer.
Some hit the hard floor
With a sharp ping
Like hail against
Your glass face.
Some shatter into fragments
Of a wasted consciousness.
Others fracture only on the inside.
Connoisseurs with monocles hold them up to
The light and write down a number
In a leather bound book.
Only the dorks know what it means.
Most of them end up bounding
Down the basement stairs
Into the scary cobwebby darkness
And come to rest next to empty paint cans
That should have been tossed out
With the dusty plastic trophies decades ago.
By now, of course, everyone has stopped watching.
