Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back poet Ken W, Farrell, based in Texas, with two witty poems centered on contrasting forms of audacity.
“Stand‑up Comic Girlfriend” unfolds as a comedy routine about love and dating. After accidentally setting his cat on fire while burning her ex’s comic‑book collection, our narrator asked him out, only to find out he was a poet.
“He once explained a poet// as someone who travels in words/ on a highway with a revolving off-ramp,/ in an elevator always stopping//though never stopping/ on the same floor. We agreed/ when we started dating// he would never travel me/ into a poem as long as I never/ did a bit about him … Yeah”
The poem reveals how poets, comedians, and creatives of all kinds draw material from the intimate terrain of their lives. Even when a piece is not strictly autobiographical, it often echoes behaviors, patterns, or emotional truths the artist has lived. Loved ones may hear themselves refracted in the work, sometimes tenderly, sometimes uncomfortably. Creativity is audacious in its vulnerability, and that vulnerability can spill beyond the artist. It calls to mind Orpheus and Eurydice and the way a muse can be both cherished and imperiled simply by being seen. Ken blends humor and colorful imagery with a faint ember of regret, a sense that something wonderful was mishandled, not intentionally, but with consequences.
“The Clown Who Stumped” turns to a different register of audacity: the brash, corrosive spectacle of political power. Without ever naming him, Ken sketches the sitting American president as a grotesque circus figure.
“The clown who stumped hid/ in a pack of rabid clowns who hurried/ him from ring to ring/ cartwheeling ahead of each question, for/ The clown who stumped had a past/ as if we didn’t know”
We recognize the figure instantly: the exaggerated expressions, the crude pranks, the practiced chaos. Ken leads us toward the shadow of sexual misconduct without stating it outright, invoking the Auguste clown’s slapstick indecency as a metaphor for moral rot. Here, audacity becomes something darker: a tool wielded for personal gain, distraction, and spite.
Together, these poems reveal the risks and dangers of audacity. At its worst, it is a destructive force seeking control, scorching anything and anyone in its path. Even in generous and creative hands, it can misfire, wounding the very relationships from which it springs. Audacity, whether rooted in ego or vulnerability, is never neutral: it can illuminate, but it can also burn.
Colorado-born, Ken W. Farrell lives and writes in Texas, his work forthcoming or published in various anthologies and journals such as South Hall Literary Magazine, NonBinary Review, Horseshoe LiteraryMagazine, Pilgrimage, and Sport Literate. Ken holds an MFA (Texas State University) and an MA (Salisbury University), and he has been an adjunct, cage fighter, pizzaiolo, and warehouseman.
Recently, Ken has begun volunteering as an English conversation buddy for Ukrainian refugees, and he is learning to act with his adult son. And Ken is (still) working to meet his daughter’s challenge to finish his novel—or to simply stop adding more and more to his tale of an orphan navigating a speculatively surreal and otherly-natural world.