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            For J.V. Cunningham

To you it is a sudden betrayal
            when the beloved frowns
            pushes you away like a fatty meal

you are unaware you breathe too heavily
            you embrace too sincerely
            your fingers to the beloved are prison bars

the beloved’s hatred of you has grown mature
            it has been preparing for many years
            underground like locusts

it gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil
            crushed. When our sophomore
            English professor read

that Gerard Manly Hopkins poem
            in his alcoholic voice
            of electricity and honey

we swooned but he leaned forward over
            his April desk half-smiling
            and said "You’ll get over it."

To be betrayed by the beloved
            is an education in itself or if it is
            a poem it is a haiku it gathers

to a greatness and utters itself
            against your fleshy imperfection
            in a few perfect airy words

like an epic it crushes
            like satire it instructs
            it is like an epigram piercing.

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