Things I Learned but No Longer Believe
Shakespeare had red hair
Van Gogh never painted a nude

Apollinaire was a pornographer
Satie wore corduroy suits

Schiller sniffed moldy apples
Edward Lear colored trees

Balzac used a raven’s quill
Hamsun survived TB

Sherwood Anderson was a Zionist
Zane Grey was a doc

Radiguet owned land in Lebanon
Mencken lived in hock

Groucho read Eliot’s eulogy
Thackeray seduced his maid

Edward Dahlberg’s dog was Mala
Rimbaud’s buried in Marseilles

Joyce was allergic to chocolate
Melville played the sax

Hart Crane had wet dreams
Chandler spayed his cats

Woolf posed naked for Freud
Goethe was four feet tall

D.H. Lawrence voted for Eisenhower
Borges owned a mall

Chekhov carted oysters
Stendhal sweated art

Poe had a canary named Ligeia
Flaubert stole Baudelaire’s heart

Bukowski
that guy
understood
only endings
but that
was more
than enough

Not a Villanelle
screams in the blonde
polyp air then peroxide
nausea pushing up
ringed fingers tarpaulin
tested flesh moldy rose
perfume privileged tits
porcelain privacy surprise

porcelain privacy surprise
perfume privileged tits
tested flesh moldy rose
ringed fingers tarpaulin
nausea pushing up
polyp air then peroxide
screams in the blonde

—Poems by Bill Yarrow
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—Foreground photo by Doriana Maria
—Background photo by Lisa Guidarinilatest jordan Sneakers | Nike Air VaporMax for Men & Women – Buy Online – Ietp