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Alex Galper
(translated from Russian)
The Real Galper
Sometimes I think
I am not the real
Alex Galper
but his clone
Be I the Real Galper
I would love a different
kind of woman
(Perhaps not
women at all)
Attend different
kind of rallies
I would vote
Have a job not of
a sweating dirty van driver
transporting insane
deteriorating old women
But that of a clean-cut
professor of literature
And to avoid
losing my position
I would force myself
to write books about
the life of Galper the clone
Seducing pretty college girls
with lies about my intimate
knowledge of this mongrel.
My Self-Defense
I am eating a delicious borsht to protest wolfish capitalism
I enjoy the fattest solyanka to fight dominance of big corporations
I torture myself with Cutlets A La Kiev in the memory of victims
of the communist Gulag
Devour Freedom Fries for the bombed-out Afghanistan,
Oven-baked hens with parsley -- to stop the war in Iraq
A whole roasted piglet on a skewer to prevent Palestinian kamikazes
from bombing Israeli discos
Withdraw your armies from Chechnya, or I will finish this apple strudel
Allow gays to get married, or I am ordering a cappuchino with cream.
The Death of a Poet
Pushkin died defending his wife"s honor
Mandelshtam, a free spirit, was sent by the tyrant
to die in a Gulag camp
Vysotsky drank himself to death in the face of
all-pervasive Soviet lies.
Galper will die from gluttony
Killing himself with the half-price sandwiches
at local Burger King.
©2005 by Alex Galper
Alex Galper was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and came to America at the age of 20. In 1996, he graduated from Brooklyn College, majoring in Creative Writing. His poems have been published in many Russian magazines. In 2002, his friends Igor Satanovsky and Mike Magazinnik translated some of his poems into English, and published his only book of billingual poetry, Fish Du Jour. See more of his work at his Web site.
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