A poem by Jack D. Harvey
Something there was about
Martin the glutton,
killed by too many suppers,
too many paddles of gravy
carried him on like
a south sea chieftain;
disordered his pouch was,
chaos marched over
his midguard like Attila.
He stammered like Demosthenes
before he puked and puked,
pissed and shat,
to the end of reckoning,
till chilly Christmas came onto the field,
till the Rockies slid into the gulf.
Something there was
about him, though he died
blowing at both ends;
those shadows of pain and surfeit
rolled him on
to greatness, to unattainable
braveness; for he ate
until he was dead,
confounding his
miserly mean-spirited enemies.
in their nightmares
they behold him, an angel
ascending,
a mighty Nimrod,
hunting the stinters and
the cautious.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, Mind In Motion, The Comstock Review, The Antioch Review, Bay Area Poets Coalition, the University of Texas Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and a number of other on-line and in print poetry magazines over the years, many of which are probably kaput by now, given the high mortality rate of poetry magazines.
The author has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York. He was born and worked in upstate New York. He is retired from doing whatever he was doing before he retired. He once owned a cat that could whistle “Sweet Adeline”, use a knife and fork, and killed a postman.
The Drunken Llama 