TWO BY JOHN REPP
Another Harvey-Pekar-Is-Dead Poem
I’ll never now befriend Harvey Pekar, nor he me,
though I delight in imagining how he’d hate
“never now” & “nor,” the snooty need to fiddle & falsify,
but I’d chuckle him out of it, the friendship we’ll never have
sunk in the fecund muck of misanthropy, fed by the food
of winter, the two of us cocking ears toward the speakers,
reverence for the past, reverence for the bent note—O Harvey,
I can’t help ornamenting our nonexistent bond!
Snow squalls have nearly killed me three times since I first heard you moan
about supermarket checkout lines & bus stops, General Electric & hippies,
pretense & pain. I huddled under my woeful blanket,
snow whistling sideways, furnace pilot blown out, coffee cold,
Wang Wei shut, you open—quality stock, Harvey, four-color cover,
splendiferous Cleveland winter, files shuttled down hallways,
clothes bins rooted-through on Saturdays, a buck for the drunk
snoring against a mailbox on Superior, the friend I should have been
right next to you at the party when you ignored the host’s baby,
the audiophile gear filling one wall more precious than the saliva-slick blob--
my God, the kid’ll grow & eat & talk, but we may never again gaze
at a $500 stylus nor go home quite so glad for the Philco Wireless
through which Bascom Lamar Lunsford wishes he was a mole in the ground
any time we want.
~ ~ ~
Another Religious Poem
…and has the carnage relented, ever? –C.K. Williams
No.
__________
Not only no, but so no
the question’s not only
absurd, but cruel,
another microgram of cruelty
on the mountain range of cruel.
__________
Another Religious Poem
…and has the carnage relented, ever? –C.K. Williams
No.
__________
Not only no, but so no
the question’s not only
absurd, but cruel,
another microgram of cruelty
on the mountain range of cruel.
__________
Slaughter [insert name(s) of power(s) or pantheon of choice] blessed, of course.
Slaughter [insert name(s) of power(s) or pantheon of choice] cursed, of course.
__________
Be assured I know
every I I am bears
ultimate responsibility.
I hate my neighbor--
his bellow, his literal
gristle & grill & Harley hog--
& every manifestation thereof
better than anyone ever has or will
& I’d be happy to prove it.
__________
You, too & don’t deny it.
__________
No mewling about [insert name of enlightened being of choice], either.
_____ breathed, breathes & will breathe the same air,
ate, eats & will eat the same feast & shat, shits & will shit
in the same pit (& so on, obviously) as you or me,
so grow up.
__________
Don’t give me that look.
This is a love poem.
