You Can Call Me Al

By Gary Dop


The song’s video should have a poem
so you’ll watch the pink room
again. Maybe you’ll you-tube it. I don’t  
care, just get the rhythm
of the silliness
before 3 ounce liquids in airline bags 
and turban fear.  Remember
how we used to sing a silly song
we didn’t understand before we sang 
the soldier song we knew wasn’t true?  I think
Chevy Chase should write the poem—
I’m Chevy Chase and you’re not  
America anymore—so we have a figure,
Chevy Chase, we can trust, a soft in the middle
role model singing purity  
in uncertainty, someone to pick up
the trumpet. 


Gary Dop lives with his wife and three daughters in Minneapolis, where he directs the Taproot Reading Series and moonlights as a professor, playwright, and stand-up comic.  Dop’s poems have appeared recently in New Letters, North American Review, Rattle, Agni, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

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