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.
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