Remembering an Account Executive

He had a back office in his older brother’s

advertising agency and understood the human asshole.

He turned his father’s small inheritance over and over

on hemorrhoid ads between three-hour lunches

at the Plaza every day and cocktails at five-thirty

with different dressy women waiting in our front office.

We joked that he fucked them up the ass to make more customers

and were nauseated by him because he picked his ears

with the lead end of his lead pencil as he argued and argued

hemorrhoid copy with us on nauseating Mad. Ave. mornings.

Why argue? It must have been for executive power-feelings

because the copy never changed. Every week, the poor

bleeding assholes bought the shit. When my mind

began to get fucked and go as black as his inner ears

I quit as broke as I began, remembering his prophecy:

that the last working television set in the world

would be showing a hemorrhoid ad for ANUSALL

at Armageddon, that it would have been written

by him, that he would be watching it at 6:00 P.M.

in the bomb-cellar lounge of the Park Plaza Hotel

with a blonde’s ass in one hand and a scotch in the other,

and that he would die happy, with his old man’s

money intact and his asshole too, unlike us prat-boys.

Copyright Credit: Alan Dugan, “Remembering an Account Executive” from Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry. Copyright © 2001 by Alan Dugan. Reprinted with the permission of Seven Stories Press.

Source: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Seven Stories Press, 2001)