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Sunday, March 1, 2020

Jeremy Stewart - bugs groucho 1-5




Jeremy Stewart won the 2014 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry for Hidden City (Invisible Publishing). He is also the author of (flood basement (Caitlin Press). His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, Geist, Lemon Hound, Open Letter, and elsewhere. He is a PhD student at Lancaster University, UK.

He once dropped a piano off a building.



***
bugs groucho I: self-portrait with greasepaint eyebrows & moustache

I am the name I assume

came early to middle age
planning to stay
switched places with a reflection
that wasn’t mine
hiding from the cops
embalmed in a cartoon
the famous mirror scene
melted in the heat of the lights
side-by-side onstage
& then my lungs were exterior
inverted trees for Hollywood
of course you realize
this means war

we reused gags
(what a Nimrod!
copy of a copy with no original
reassembled as a wound
operatic in scope, operatic in scale
between a five-pointed & a six-pointed star
you bet your life

my friends, I am highly gratified at this
magnificent display of effusion
& I want you to know—
  
 ***
bugs groucho II: I awake to find myself onstage

today I didn’t wake up
torpid month of July
carpe nomen
before I joined the circus

all light has become stagey for me
all bars cagey
leaning against a prison wall
rolling a cigarette
got nowhere, but acutely
(if I stay here I'll go nuts
continue long after the end
I suppose for no reason

kicked in the face by the dancing horse
my teeth tumble through a hoop
never wake

tuned the radio strangely
& out spits the very song in my head

the piano falls off the building
gee, ain’t I a stinker?

why fuck around with second-rate talent
get Kaufman & Ryskind to write the poem







 ***
bugs groucho III: self-portrait with carrot

hey, I'm in the wrong picture!
he said I’d end up as a blank
a nothing like
your name

stroke my slick hare
operatic in shtick, operatic in schlock
tell me about your id
when you was a kid

rapid-fire mouthfuls with Clark Bagel
leaning against a fence
on the family farm
smile—literature’s bastards

only the music of a malfunctioning electrical transformer
can take you back      to the wind
through those farmhouse cracks

blood squirts from the rabbit
but it’s actually just ketchup












 ***
bugs groucho IV: Lauren Bacall

what baby wants, baby gets
I hear baby cough through the door
sing with the parakeets of the Mocrumbo
she pressed her chin against her chest
faced the camera
& tilted her eyes upward
at that very moment in Valozhyn
they entered the Ghetto
is my Aunt Minnie in here?
killed the two Jewish policemen at the gate
& then began shooting & gathering the Jews
into a large blacksmith shop
with candy-coloured barber poles
where they set a table with drinks
surrounded by machine guns
while drinking & singing they shot
into the building “to silence the crying”

there is no Las Vegas in Germany

(I did a two-minute Charleston
on the bunker where they say
Hitler committed suicide

well, somebody's gotta do it








 ***
bugs groucho V: excuse me, I can’t stand up

operatic in structure, operatic in style
I’ve done precisely nothing
to merit the comparison
except trade cigars for carrots
wrote three memoirs by 40
& one of them almost half-true
a drunk model I
mean a model
drunk I mean
a maudlin drunk
but it’s okay, I haven’t had a drink
in days or possibly hours
through the agency of candy-striped
barber poles
a ribcage in which to reside
I worked my self-conscious fraudulence routine
to the point of virtue               to the point
of a trademark
well, what did you expect in an opera? a happy ending?
I must be going
I really must be