David LohreyThe UnelectedAfter "The Mosquito" by D. H. Lawrence You don’t know that I exist, and I don’t know that you exist. Now then! It is you, Trump, It is you, hateful little Trump, You pointed fiend, Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you: It is your small, hateful bugle in my ear. That incessant buzz. Why do you do it? Surely it is bad policy. Melania says you can’t help it. If that is so, then I believe in Providence protecting the innocent. But it sounds so amazingly like the slogan, MAGA, A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp. Blood, red blood Super-magical Forbidden liquor. I behold you stand For a second enspasmed in oblivion. Obscenely ecstasied Sucking the live blood, My blood. You stagger As well you may. Only your accursed yellow wavey curls endure. Your own imponderable weightiness, your bulk Saves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in Its snatching. A dirigible of lies. Away with a paean of derision, You winged blood-drop, you speck, you ghoul on wings. What a big stain my sucked blood makes Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you! Odd, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into! Even the Gestapo Needs Rest There are these lines, lines that startle. Words uttered on TV shows, movies, or even in life. Things that Mom or Dad might have said. Words that amuse. Phrases that make you laugh. My favorite was said by Senator Keeley in The Birdcage to his daughter’s new family: her fiancée and his gay parents. Hackman said, “The foliage in Ohio is underrated.” One of the silliest ideas promoted by the American academy is that poetry is nourished by booze and good will. The White Horse pub gets all the credit. If you look into the matter, you will learn that without Pittsburgh steel, there would be no Modern poetry. One can live with banality but not with evil. Most of us live with routine, boredom, solitude, and possibly hatred. Little happens to excite us as much as Wallace Stevens. Promises pile up; they can make one feel smothered, starved, trapped, or imprisoned. Who wouldn’t understand? And then there is threat. One gets beaten up by words, frightened, told what’s what, perhaps enraged. Nice words don’t come often into our daily lives. If we are lucky, we will never hear nor utter insults. What if you heard one spoken by some gunslinger in a dusty bar? You, too, might draw your gun and start blasting. “I’ve heard you are a low-down Yankee liar.” Kenneth Rexroth, Ezra Pound, and Bertolt Brecht depended on the good will of James Laughlin and the depth of the Monongahela River. The collected works of Tennessee Williams would not exist were it not for the Hazelwood Steel Works, which only goes to show that Ludwig Wittgenstein was right to have studied mechanical engineering. We would all love to study literature, but love’s got nothing to do with it. “Prove it.” The gunslinger accepts the challenge, blinks, and dies in the crossfire. We all sigh with relief and, if we are honest, considerable glee. Yes, we are delighted to see the bad guy die. He had it coming. In this wonderful moment, we are all Alan Ladd; we are Shane. We are the good, and the bad guy is dead, which just goes to show once and for all that killing is a whole lot of fun. For this we should be ashamed and, it has to be said, some of us are. David Lohrey’s poems can be found throughout the US and the UK, esp. at Expat Press, The Dead Mule School, and Spillwords. His poetry has appeared worldwide, most often in Australia, Ireland, the Netherlands, Malawi, and India. David’s plays are available online at ProPlay (CA). His fiction appears in Coffin Bell, Storgy, Terror House, Eclectica Magazine, and Literally Stories. David’s first collection of poetry, Machiavelli’s Backyard, was publishedin 2017. His newest collection of fiction and poetry, Bluff City, appeared in August, 2020, published by Terror House Press. He lives in Tokyo.previous page     contents     next page
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Article 19
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