Sexist Gorilla: It May Be Running Away from You Already

"Write a long poem,"

My brain told me.

"Make it long and obfuscated,

"Such that those triflers who would cause you trouble

"Will be bored by the second stanza."

"Aye . . . and reference Melville and

"Faulkner in order

"To make them feel

"Inadequate, inarticulate."

"And then in the middle of the poem, there

"You can place it

"With impunity."

"A long poem?" I replied

In question.

"But what metric? What

"Rule?

"What form

"?" I

Asked

.

"A

"Nyt

"Hi

"N

"G

",

""

I remember at my good friend's bachelor party my brother did a strip tease dressed as Marilyn Monroe. He is a large man. And hairy, with coarse, dark hair covering his body. But he wore a blonde wig, and fake eyelashes, and a pink, satin dress.

Later, we ran away from my other friend Jim (that's not his real name). We made him run naked around the house. Well, we asked him to run naked around the house, and then we challenged his manhood when he did not want to do it.

So he took off his clothes and ran around the house.

And we drove away in our cars very fast.

I rode in a car with my brother,

Who was dressed like a street-walking mother,

And when Jim got undressed,

Monroe stomped on the gas,

And we drove all the way to Nantucket.

Ahem.

"Did we lose them?" I asked.

100 miles per hour

Is very fast to drive

At night

On blue highways

Where deer feed in the ditches.

"Did we lose him?" I asked.

"I think so," he replied.

He slammed the brakes and we slid sideways across the middle of the concrete pavement,

Like they do in the movies when the stuntman needs to stop quickly and drive back in the opposite direction.

But this was no movie, I think,

And no ")"

--yet it felt it would be.

The yellow headlights of his Japanese pickup had grown very dim behind us, and when we passed him at 110 miles per hour, I could still tell, even in the dark, and with the speed, that he had not yet dressed himself above the waist.

Melville. Faulkner. Whitman. Eliot. Pound. Hemingway. Frost. Beckett. Goethe. Dostoevsky. Atkins. William. Carlos. Williams. Steinbeck. Vonnegut. Irving. Dubus. Cummings. Kafka. Miller. King. Twain.

(Close readers will notice that there are no women writers listed above. This may or may not signify anything. "What's wrong with being sexy?" I asked.)

"Everything that Rises Must Converge"

When God molded man from the red clay,

Blowing breath into his brain,

Invigorating guts and sinews

Simultaneously setting soul and flesh

Together, inseparable,

He made man naked.

And when I want to remember that

I, too, am made by God,

I go out on a summer night,

Naked.

It is difficult not to know God

On the pavement,

In the nude.

My heart pounded, riding shotgun in Monroe's sports car. Accelerating through the gearbox at maximum RPMs. Cats meowing beneath the hood.

"Was it long enough?" I asked.

"I do not know."

When we arrived at our destination, he found us:

It is difficult to fool a man who is naked.

"By whose standards is this long?" my brain asked.

"By whose standards is this a poem?" I replied.

"Touché!"