Harrison Fisher

The Late Show and The Late Late Show

1
The Brute Man (1946)

The late show is
The Brute Man, starring
acromegalic Rondo Hatton.

My neighbor
in real life is a brute man, too,
large and ugly. Through the wall
I can hear the same movie
on his TV
nearly in sync with mine.

He types sometimes—
a naive memoir? A weird novel?
He hunts and pecks.
Can he spell? He’s pecking now.

The movie drones on.
From the window, I see
a wind-blown newspaper
claw its way down the street. 

I wander back to the couch:
the movie Brute Man is
making his bathetic appeal
to a beautiful young woman. 
Fearful, she steps
toward him.

I feel for her,
her story wasted here—
no good can come of this. 
Then they, mirabile dictu,
embrace!                                                      

The pecking stops.
I hear the movie
echoing next door,
and the neighbor’s
brute peal of approval.

Feeling glum, I wander away.                                                                                  
At the window again,
I hear the heavy sky,
the carbon dark,
settling like a pillow
over a face.

 

2
Creature Of Destruction (1967)

A hypnotist’s
blonde assistant
is the one-woman subject
of the stage show,
seduced nightly
into regression,

mind control
reaching through her
across aeons
to a homicidal
amphibi-woman
in this remake of
The She-Creature (1956),
the black-and-white origin.

The conjured monster
reaches out
to the luscious captive
for psychical union,
or identity, or something
from the id’s store
of the shallows;

we know
the hypnotist
is the real villain,
freaming for the suggestible
woman’s body, which
he will have
by hypnotic eye.
                                                                             
Cue the creature, whose
ping pong-ball eyes
were funny at first, but now
we confront its gaze
uneasily—

unblinking, merciless
ping pong-ball eyes
that have seen
flowering plants born
and rocks age,

as the creature
leaves the water
to kill again, sure,
but also to test
Montaigne’s epigraph
(apparently
a mistranslation,
sorry to say)

that opened tonight’s
late late show,
now recurring
as epilogue to close it: 
“There is no monster
in the world  . . . 
so treacherous as man.”

 

Harrison Fisher has published twelve collections of poems, most recently Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real.  In 2024, he has new work appearing in BlazeVOX, Book XI, Clade Song, dadakuku, MIDLVLMAG, Misfitmagazine (#38), Rundelania, Stone Poetry Quarterly, and Transom.