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Let’s Make a Deal, The Man-Thing, and Howard
the Duck
By Julian Bernick
____________________
Let’s Make a Deal
You can shave my head if I can shave yours.
The Man-Thing (a tribute to Marvel
Comics of the 70s)
For Richard Rory, back, and full of gin,
In Florida, in Citrusville, to be
Exact, there is but one gone-lonely friend
Who trudges in a viscous reverie.
For Richard Rory-- finally-- sold out!
The eternal loser! Hard (still) to believe--
But fucking true. He's rich, without a doubt;
Across this strung-out nation slackers grieve
For Rory, storied, gloried prototype
A weasel-weakling-jackal-hippy putz
Who cringed beneath a blurb of torrid hype
Whatever knows fear burns at the Man-Thing's touch!
The Man-Thing: stretch of swamp some eight feet tall.
THE MOST THROBORRIFIC CESS-BEAST OF THEM ALL!
Howard The Duck
(For Gerber & Colan)
Lost in a world he claimed not to have made,
he chomped his cheap cigar and quacked his ire
at everything he saw. But now, retired,
he shrugs his downy shoulders: "Anger fades."
What rough, billed beast, bedecked in Bozo clothes
waddled toward Cleveland to be bored?
O huffy Howard, I, for one, adored
you. Stupid land! What shining shame! What woe
to the ones that squarely squandered him.
A talking duck? But this was ‘76
and anything was possible for us.
Since Watergate, the half-glimpsed, half-hid fin
of fishy statesmen sank (as in Loch Ness)
A fowl looked good next to foulness such as this.
____________________
Julian Bernick is an aging, misunderstood
MONSTER OF ROCK! gnashing his teeth against the slings and arrows of an
indifferent cosmos. He graduated from That Workshop Place (TM). He has
also published online at Diceybrown.com, 42opus.com and Whimperbang.com. He
lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two cats, stopping to smell the flowers
often and patiently awaiting the end of the world. His favorite food is
pizza.
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