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PN Review 275
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This poem is taken from PN Review 104, Volume 21 Number 6, July - August 1995.

Three Poems John Ashbery


Awful Effects of Two Comets
There will not always be a step
to the undoing of the rightness you now so justly feel

in the edge of Hong Kong where it's all right to buy spirits. The
canal crowd threw fetters at him.
Then there will not always be a stair
to punish the unborn and the boy who said he'd rather

do it on another day. There is a chair,
its arms rubbed almost bare from excess living.
There is a fan I think over there.

Otherwise we make no money off them.
They're not worth importing, only to smoke
the tips of and then the whole magazine
goes up, to some surprise and cheers
on the part of petite nudist pedestrians
...


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