Remembering An Account Executive

A poem by Alan Dugan

He had a back office in his older brother’s

advertising agency and understood the human asshole.

He turned his father’s small inheritance over and over

on hemorrhoid ads between three-hour lunches

at the Plaza every day and cocktails at five-thirty

with different dressy women waiting in our front office.

We joked that he fucked them up the ass to make more customers

and were nauseated by him because he picked his ears

with the lead end of his lead pencil as he argued and argued

hemorrhoid copy with us on nauseating Mad. Ave. mornings.

Why argue? It must have been for executive power-feelings

because the copy never changed. Every week, the poor

bleeding assholes bought the shit. When my mind

began to get fucked and go as black as his inner ears

I quit as broke as I began, remembering his prophecy:

that the last working television set in the world

would be showing a hemorrhoid ad for ANUSALL

at Armageddon, that it would have been written

by him, that he would be watching it at 6:00 P.M.

in the bomb-cellar lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel

with a blonde’s ass in one hand and a scotch in the other,

and that he would die happy, with his old man’s

money intact and his asshole too, unlike us prat-boys.

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Poems in English 

• Call It Music by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Black Stone On Top Of Nothing by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Bitterness by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Berenda Slough by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Belle Isle, 1949 by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• At Bessemer by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Any Night by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Another Song by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Animals Are Passing From Our Lives by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• An Abandoned Factory, Detroit by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Among Children by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• A Woman Waking by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• A Theory Of Prosody by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• A Sleepless Night by Philip Levine by Philip Levine
• Sonnet III: With how sad steps by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney
• Sonnet II: Not At First Sight by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney
• Sonnet I: Loving In Truth by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney
• Song from Arcadia by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney
• Song by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney
• Sleep by Sir Philip Sidney by Philip Sidney

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Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)

Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.

Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees

Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.

Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.

 

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