Jim Behrle – Three Poems


Jim Behrle

Three Poems

I Can No Longer Be Friends with Professors


my navel will grow ferocious teeth and eat your family

that’s *it*, I’m switching to prose

I leave it all in your hands, magic party whore

everything depends upon the wheelbarrow

crammed up your ass or into the back of your Saab

though inside I remain a fluffy sobbing dandelion

this is great / I don’t feel threatened by you at all

the air is purple and alive again

the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme is playing

now I remember where I know you from: The DSM IV

with that pvc taste in my mouth

in the future we’ll sleep in aquariums podcasting

my love for you was a tasty bird to eat

while you were grading papers / sucking on tweed

isn’t it strange the things we have to do to bodies to excite them

I adored the blurb you gave me so much

I wrote you a thank you blurb, all in italics

now sitting cross-legged in the faculty parking lot

the sky the color of tenure

conifers and elk-upchuck envigorating the pine-scented conservatism

nothing ma! no, we’re not enriching uranium!

oh only in dreams do I get to relapse


Fantasy Answer Encyclical

I want to shock you in a wine & cheese kind of way

I want to lie with Louise Glück in the back of a pick-up trück

My poems shall rule for 1000 years

For I schmooze hardcore

Chrysanthemum this!

Egret of the swooning noon

Your glasses will be ready in about an hour

Echo Charlie Bravo Sabbatical

Ass camaro hit my work study

I soooo wanna headbutt somebody

My mom farted in your mom’s ear

Now give me a grant

What’s my secret?

Being non-threatening, blandly friendly and benign

At all times

Did I mention this is a pantoum?

Mediocre poets will always rule

And I shall be their Prince Albert

Because baby you smell like a Guggenheim


This Connection of Everyone With Juliana Spahr

Totally fill me with kids / “makes me laugh when I’m with you”

Dirty aardvark / dirty dolphin / dirty koala / man-eating panda

I want to *hit* that shit

Greenpoint Station filthy alit

Our mouth against the junk / thus swells the boring beautiful chello

“I was gonna kill that bitch Desdemona anyway”

You always devastate me / and nothing is rhyming

The USA manufactures Wasted Lives

Dead eagles / dead dirty martians / dirty half-dead wife

In the dream I make out with Barry Manilow

Amid the inescapable vanilla maw of men against women

I swallow everything / puke twice on my mother

Sorry I blew off your panel

Chased by undead tigers / undead zebras / refried beans

I have never belonged to anyone

And time is running out

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