BELIEVE IT OR NOT!

Why not put a whale penis in a poem?

If Robert L. Ripley could stock a Chinese junk

with spectacles from around the world

then why can’t I fill my little creations

with queeriosities, as he called them.

With Cyclops children, three-headed calves,

chastity belts and Iron Maidens,

human inchworms and pincushions,

fork-tongued beauties,

and shrunken heads from Ecuador.

I could devote a stanza to the man

who hangs himself weekly and lives

to flaunt his leathered neck and rope burn.

Or to the woman, immune to heat and fire,

who swallows flaming torches.

Or to the man who has squids for hands.

Or the effects artist who specializes in weather -  

fogs, tempests, blizzards -

but who works hardest, believe it or not,

making the smallest of breezes.

Why would I do this?

Not because I have something to sell

like sympathy or Schadenfreude.

No, not because of this.

But because I can.

Isn’t that reason enough?

I could have a man cough up a bullet

forty-five years after he was shot in the chest.

And I could hang that slug at the poem’s center

like a purple heart.

And then to entertain myself further

and hopefully you too,

I could polish totem poles.

Or out-bargain Armenian rug merchants

who lurk at the fringes.

Or have corrective surgery

on my crooked teeth.

Or smoke yard long cigars. Two at a time.

Or traffic anachronism and hyperbole,

the spurious and the specious

like contraband or illicit metaphors

through my poems.

And I could make mention

of my dog and my girlfriend

in the same breath by saying their names,
respectfully and respectively: Hanky Panky.

I could confess that I don’t drive a car,

but I know how to float.

I could tell you, with some deviousness,

that a June Bug is actually a May beetle

and ruin your summer.

And then just for good measure I might

stretch the parameters of what a poem is

even further still by visiting

countries that don’t exist,

by mailing my mail

from an airplane over Africa,

by stammering and stuttering

and making sounds

my mouth was not meant to make.

I could slick back my widow’s peak

and dance like Fred Astaire on stilts.

And then I could increase my attention span

by conversing with only women

who speak eight words per second.

And I might even boast that my grandmother

was a Ziegfeld Follies girl, though she wasn’t.

I could also tell you I slept with a Dutch wife,

and really only mean I bedded down

with a big, long-ass pillow.

And then, when the timing was right,

I could unveil the fish that swims backwards,

and send it shimmering against the current

of my finely crafted verse.

And then finally,

as the poem’s pièce de résistance,

I could introduce you to

the greatest curiosity of all, Hope.

You know it: that thing with feathers,

as Emily Dickenson once upon a time had penned.

And it would be our job - yours and mine -

despite my false bravado and what I’ve said here -

to keep it out of harm’s way,

out of odditoriums and places like

the Mütter Museum or

Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

Keep it out of the hands of hucksters

and hoodwinkers, like myself.

Keep it and its illusory plumage

sleekly preened and forever safe.

Inspired by the New Yorker book review entitled,

“The Odyssey: Robert Ripley and his world,”

written by Jill Lepore, June 3, 2013 issue.