Goddfrey Hammit.

goes the joke, the kind simple enough for a kid to set up
and deliver–a first-joke joke–and the kind an adult doesn’t mind
rehearing, because don’t both kid and grown-up know by now
 
the truth that a bad situation can always get worse? And can’t
both see the humor in what’s unsaid, in piecing two halves together?
Though it is a fine line, the humor of misfortune, because who,
 
for a real belly-laugh, wants to consider the worm in all this,
whose situation is certainly worse? What’s worse… the young worm
might say to the older, setting up a joke the older worm remembers
 
telling in his own salad-nibbling days, a classic of worm-humor:
What’s worse, it goes, than to find yourself munching through sweetness,
the sun spilling in green-tinted and the sugar slaking your wormy body,
 
which tunnels along at the sour taste on your skin and the thought
that this is more than you could ever eat: you could never eat a world,
which this is, a planet of light and life–you’re no destroyer of worlds,
 
just hungry, and, just as you’re feeling it’s all too good to be true,
this heaven you find yourself in is bitten in two (and you with it)
as a God with a black-hole maw makes a snack of existence itself,
 
and then tosses you aside with disgust at what was your home,
and you, and leaving you wondering what had happened and
wondering where, oh where, had your other half gone?
 
No punchline, but the older worm will laugh because one laughs
at what one can’t control, and because don’t both know by now that,
for a worm, what one can’t control includes nearly all of it?
 
Luck was all it was, being a worm born beneath an apple tree,
the soil sweet from last year’s rot, and the plunk of falling fruit that
drew you up, out of the dark, savory soil to sugary flesh.
 
And then there’s the joke that nobody tells, because it’s a joke
only understood by apples, which goes, What’s better than to be
an apple, so green after a summer of bobbing on the hot wind,
 
so fat from sucking the sweetness from the molasses-colored ground,
and so planet-round that someone, going in for a bite, hardly notices
the worm-sized hole, edged in brown like a cigarette burn,
 
which, you thought, might mar you from being enjoyed again,
but then–ahh–the snap of teeth sinking into firm, worm-riddled flesh,
and what’s better? What, possibly, could be better than that?

“What’s Worse…?” first appeared in Rat’s Ass Review