Wild as myth, silent as fate
He is not king, nor knave,
Yet wild in hate,
Sances between them like smoke—
a riddle in the deck,
Keeps the enemies close and friends richer
Smiles with bare allegiance, raising the stakes

Painted in motley,
He wears chaos as if a crown,
a wildcard whispering:
Holding and beholding his own assertion
His miniature face on the marotte hails itself
Rules made in jest, it says, are threads to be cut.
Motions and stress of a fracturing surface.
Pretend solidarity and imitate love, he’s a solitary notion.

One moment a fool,
The next—a bigger one, no reserves.
Empty of profundity or insight,
Replete with tantrums, he breaks the game,
tries becoming it, via
Full sequencing of a pernicious plight

His laughter folds time,
At his palace of red fountain and
The court of inflated egos
Flogging insults and callous embargoes,
His steps rewrite chance,
And as he enters your hand,
Nothing plays out as planned.

Not red, not black,
but all and neither—
He is the storm’s grin,
a leer sordid,
reductive, conclusive, neutered by ignorance,
He hides the silence of a luck running thin.

Omen in ink, words of a thug
He waits in the deck like a held breath,
In his third act, a humbug
face cracked in a painted sneer,
neither suit nor sworn—a stranger
The Joker trumps no king, to his utter despair,
A two-dimensional embodiment of dread, list of
Tumbleweed comedies slither out of bed, that
Flushes its tail down the tank, and
Stacks the deck.
On gullible yokels he can bank.

Draw him,
And the laws bleed.
For humanity fell off the double helix of his make,
A minotaur not born, perhaps, but turned to partake, for evil’s sake.

He is the shadow behind the shuffle,
Apostle of apathetic extermination
a jest forged from nightmares,
draped in colours that mock the living
and clapping quietly at the dead.

Where he appears,
order unthreads.
Kings fall, queens turn, the map tumbles,
conservations burn
And the aces tremble in their thrones.

He bears no number,
for he is beyond counting—
a non-avian bogey skipping extinction
a ghost in the game, pale of a groan,
a knife in the smile, an obscene moan.
Dawn breaks in tears, with clumps of broken dew, as he tries his hand to
Stir up, talk over, often trample on, and then
clapped within, by a selected few.
His Q-Tip club with inherited rub,
Liberally quips over the rest, outside the purview.

Not a card—
But a curse in disguise.
He doesn’t play fair.
Waste of a table-talk, a permanent grimace, insolent – a race to the bottom.
He tops the deck in bombs and demolition,
Disorder, free-falls, and tremors across the tab.
One-sided, unangular, pointless, he is an emoticon, a spreadsheet warrior, a long-arm
adjudicator. Spoiled of a gab.

Wildcard, he is no joke, intends no pun, but
Gawps at his vignette, everywhere, unearned.
To say the last word, to draw the first blood,
He flip-flops, confronts, then recoils, calls bluff to reason,
He shuffles trust, for he feels that he must, and
Rejects the billions that matter the most:
People in the deep end, as alive as ghosts. 

The Joker is no card at all—
He is the question on the deck
doesn’t dare answer.

– Hasib Iftekhar