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21 Another Harvey-Pekar-Is-Dead Poem I’ll never now befriend Harvey Pekar, nor he me, though I delight in imagining how he’d hate “never now” & “nor,” the snooty need to fiddle & falsify, but I’d chuckle him out of it, the friendship we’ll never have sunk in the fecund muck of misanthropy, fed by the food of winter, the two of us cocking ears toward the speakers, reverence for the past, reverence for the bent note—O Harvey, I can’t help ornamenting our nonexistent bond! Snow squalls have nearly killed me three times since I first heard you moan about supermarket checkout lines & bus stops, General Electric & hippies, pretense & pain. I huddled under my woeful blanket, snow whistling sideways, furnace pilot blown out, coffee cold, Wang Wei shut, you open—quality stock, Harvey, four-color cover, splendiferous Cleveland winter, files shuttled down hallways, clothes bins rooted-through on Saturdays, a buck for the drunk snoring against a mailbox on Superior, the friend I should have been right next to you at the party when you ignored the host’s baby, the audiophile gear filling one wall more precious than the saliva-slick blob— my God, the kid’ll grow & eat & talk, but we may never again gaze at a $500 stylus nor go home quite so glad for the Philco Wireless through which Bascom Lamar Lunsford wishes he was a mole in the ground any time we want. ...

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