Allocarnation
Trosky and Gurdjiev, old now,
boarding the train I am on,
bearded and white and (see!)
they now can teach no pain,
they are old and — there! —
the Hitler trembles with choleric eye
as some are calm,
filling up the old boys,
memories and epochs still alive.
Still faces wearing bodies they,
they advertise the way
they marked an age
and ate and were
its thoughts of what would be.
William Walrond Strangmeyer was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and Brofus, New Jersey. He has worked in amusement parks, banks, book stores, cinema, door-to-door sales, restaurants, taxi driving, warehouses, theater and as a tour guide and was also co-editor of Upstairs at Duroc, a Paris literary review, blowing his chances at working-class-hero status.
His main influences are science fiction, doo-wop music and a mis-spent youth, along with the usual Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Poe, Catullus, Larkin, Elroy, Doctor Seuss, Baudelaire, and also Emmylou Harris, Leonard Cohen, Fedor Emilianenko, Bartók, and Roy Orbison.
Stone Poetry Quarterly 