July 26th, 2012
Link • Audio, Poems, Tributes • 1 Comment
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Alison Luterman
BIG NAKED MAN
Slumps, glowering,
ten feet tall
in a corner of the white museum.
The little live boy is amazed
at the man’s gigantic penis,
slack, pink, hairy.
He giggles with his hand over his mouth,
pointing at the sad sack balls
ten times their normal size,
hanging like discouraged tomatoes
in the wrinkled pink scrotum.
Here, little boy, is what you get if you’re lucky,
if you live to get old:
pendulous belly, thighs like spoiled milk,
veins, splotches, wrinkles, enlarged pores.
The big naked man
has spent all his non-life in various galleries,
amazing and disgusting onlookers.
Is he really polyester?
How long did it take to make him?
They never ask, Who loved him?
Although clearly someone did:
enough to render
in perfect precision every detail of his downfall,
and then leave him
naked, and vulnerable,
just like the rest of us in the end.
–from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets
good poem