I remember that summer
when she'd pull out Charlie -
which was what she affectionately
called my prick -
& being an artist,
she'd draw a face on it.
Then, without moving her lips,
she'd go to work:
"Hello, how're you?
My name's Charlie."
The first time, I laughed.
It was like meeting a stranger.
We stared at each other.
"What do you do?
What's your name?"
I couldn't take my eyes off him.
After a while,
Charlie started taking over.
He was the center of attention,
the life of the party.
He'd stay up all night.
Next morning, she’d ring me:
"How’s Charlie?
Are you looking after him?"
Sure... sure, I'd say,
giving him a reassuring pat.
He was the picture of confidence.
He gave me a helluva time.
One day, inexplicably,
she added eyelashes, a beauty spot
& bright-red lipstick.
The transformation was remarkable.
Charlie had changed into a woman.
It called me "big boy" in a squeaky voice;
it pouted & pulled faces.
I blushed.
The rest of me was speechless.
Then it became political.
Overnight I became a total shit;
a chauvinist pig.
It wanted to know
what kind of relationship is this, anyway?
It chastised me for not being able
to see beyond the end of my dick.
Later, the ventriloquist split,
taking her paints, her pens,
her mandolin & clothes.
"You never talk to me anymore,"
she said.
"So long."
She left Charlie behind.
He slept all day;
the old eloquence was gone.
I couldn't put words in his mouth.
Then his face disappeared
entirely.
It was a shock at first, but
I survived.
Now, taking a piss, sometimes,
I actually smile, remembering
those days & nights of indelible lust
when love was neither deaf nor dumb
nor altogether blind.
He liked the monkeys & the hippos,
the polar bears, & even the birds,
of course...
but most of all, he loved the elephants.
The elephants were dependable -
solid and definite as the paperweights
he'd played with on his father's desk.
You could trust the elephants.
"The elephants," he said,
"the elephants are my friends."
So he learned their stories,
their way of speaking, their private jokes
& what they knew of love and keeping;
& by the time he was nine,
had mastered their vocabulary,
committing to heart their logarithms & astronomy.
He could walk like them, talk like them,
& even recall small facts about
some of the really great one
who'd made big names for themselves.
On special days,
before he was allowed to travel on his own,
he'd go with his father to the zoo
to say hello to his mates -
the Indian & the African -
waiting for the keeper to come
with leaves of hay,
or brush & bucket to scrub them clean,
transforming their skin
into an ineluctable rubberiness.
By the time he was eleven,
he knew their gestures & their joys,
imagining a life in other countries,
free of cages,
before Loxodonta africanus stumbled
accidentally
into a crowd of peanuts & boys.
As he recalled it,
to touch the eye of his first elephant
he would've needed a hook'n'ladder;
it was so high, its grey head
scraped the ceiling in the animal enclosure.
Outside, you would've lost it
in a cloud.
Lost - the child grows down into the man.
And year after year, the elephants grow smaller.
The big one - though he searched for it everywhere -
he never saw it again.
Behind the locks that keep us safe,
inside the Sundays of our brains,
hordes of creatures are detained
that can't be fed & won't be named.
We play our parts. The strongest cage:
the human heart.
Not good, not bad, not false, not true.
The incomparable comfort of sawdust
contains the fool.
Fat is not
a four-letter word.
Stop terrorising yourself.
Power walking is not the answer
to everything.
If you want to live longer,
don’t want.
Habits are carcinogenic.
Take a leaf out of Walt:
"go freely with uneducated persons...
& with the mothers of families"
Use salt sparingly.
Get up with the sun.
Do the unexpected.
Trees are good. Music helps.
Love mystery.
Be kind to animals.
Talk to the earth.
Be mindful of the dead.
Avoid people who speak
endlessly of God,
and...
oh yeah,
go to the dentist
regularly.
Their genus is insatiable: Labroides dimitiatus.
They feed in schools.
Working close to the gills,
they scavenge food from the mouths of other fishes.
The females follow the male. They go where he goes.
Resistance is out of the question.
There is no thought of subverting his authority.
Freedom is not part of their vocabulary.
There is no alliance against this
ancient single-mindedness.
Instead,
the females form a pecking order under him.
When the male dies, the alpha female takes his place.
The cells of her flesh revolt.
The bony sockets in her skull are too small for the eyes.
She grows larger, acquires male organs...
mysteriously,
another female arrives.
Half-asleep, I fall
in and out of your flesh.
Genealogy is a complicated silence.
We have given birth to Memory.
Listen:
you can hear the sound of loss -
an awkward moan dignified by weeping.
How many times
have I knocked on your door,
turned back the sheets in order
that the sun might rise; realized inheritance
in a fingernail of moon?
I run towards your shadow,
hoping it will save me.
Loping towards that stone wall
I dreamed I was naked
in chains.