John Gallaher

I’m Not Afraid of Pop Music

I’m all for entertainment. Why not a few minutes away
from the world? It’s still going to be there when we get back.
So goodbye, everyone! I’m off to the radio, which still exists,
inexplicably, with pop music from the 90s everyone said
was so bad, but doesn’t look so bad now. Actually, it still
looks bad. It’s just that now looks worse, but not in all ways.
It wafted. It’s like stumbling onto a meeting of a hate group,
and they’re playing a song we like, and that they like music,
especially that they might have good taste, is a difficult
moment for us, because art was supposed to make us better people.
Maybe it does. Maybe people would be even worse without it.
Like being happy a moment in a larger sphere of worry.
Like running around saying “love love love,” in the way
“united nations” sounds nice. What a good idea. What promise.

So here’s a gift of this pretty blue heron lifting from the marsh
into a purple pink sky picking up accents of feather and pure light.
It appears suddenly, like a reference to Amelia Earhart. And then
you’re treading water in the Indian Ocean. No, we said “tapas,”
not “topless.” And then a second time, with broken
statuary. I’ve failed in a million little, unremarkable ways,
rather than one big way. And look, here’s the world
just like we left it, in the manner of Hollywood imagining Moses
or JFK, and assorted closet dramas through the 19th and 18th
centuries. The rock of your passion and the crystal of your soul
come together. This is going to be interesting. It’s a tropical
decision or a party ghost. One day you’re standing in spring,
and then you’re singing “Please Mr. Postman”
on a mission over Burma in the final days of the war.

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John Gallaher's current book of poetry is My Life in Brutalist Architecture (Four Way Books 2024). Recent or forthcoming poems appear in APR, Ploughshares, Heavy Feather Review and others. He lives in northwest Missouri and co-edits the Laurel Review.