David Lohrey


The Unelected
			After "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.
 
 

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