Elephant Boy
The boy on the elephant looks like the elephant, his trunk done up gray with verticals of darker gray, shadows in the deep fold of his thought. Once black and the prince of all elephant-boys, he chose himself the path of gray through undergrowth and overgrowth, heavy-bladed fern and sago palm, strangling vine, Johnny-jump-up, sucking orchid, razor-bush. Like his beast he joys in beating down jungle and plain, swamp and desert, gully and mountain, his blued face with its traceries of ruin taking each new cut and windburn as talisman, chapters in scripture, history of a butchery made easy by its hidden melodies being scored there.
*****
All up one arm and down the other, coiling wrist to shoulder and shoulder to wrist, the names of his downtrodden, cut into biceps and triceps to remind him, each time he raises a glass, of who has drowned there. Like Delia (or Delilah or Delicia — the letters have weathered and sunk in the bark of his skin, seeking some darker place where the blood can wash them) or Denise or Derisa or Desire or Destine: whoever is cooked there in his left arm's crook, her d's and i's and e's constant, the rest just a soup of her in which his meat steeps ... or his creditors, their red ink needled into his cock, the debts swollen and turned dark blue as he strokes himself or buries his miseries in someone else. One day, he thinks, all this will be cut off, but for now it is enough to strangle and chafe.
*****
He has saved his buttocks and legs for brighter colors, pinks and yellows, roses, birds, and honey-flowing breasts. These cartoons of pleasure, he insists, are better than any pleasure measured well and drawn by steady hands. How he hates the calm pleasures of the ticket-taker, the barker, and the acrobat, the mocking pleasure of the clowns, the false ones of the illusionists, the weeping pleasures of the freaks! Only the tattooist decorates his pleasure to suit him, his grim smiling quiet stitchery always peeked at in a mirror, with its sweet frosting of blood, poised between memory and infection and underscored with an infectious memory of pain.
*****
All up one arm and down the other, coiling wrist to shoulder and shoulder to wrist, the names of his downtrodden, cut into biceps and triceps to remind him, each time he raises a glass, of who has drowned there. Like Delia (or Delilah or Delicia — the letters have weathered and sunk in the bark of his skin, seeking some darker place where the blood can wash them) or Denise or Derisa or Desire or Destine: whoever is cooked there in his left arm's crook, her d's and i's and e's constant, the rest just a soup of her in which his meat steeps ... or his creditors, their red ink needled into his cock, the debts swollen and turned dark blue as he strokes himself or buries his miseries in someone else. One day, he thinks, all this will be cut off, but for now it is enough to strangle and chafe.
*****
He has saved his buttocks and legs for brighter colors, pinks and yellows, roses, birds, and honey-flowing breasts. These cartoons of pleasure, he insists, are better than any pleasure measured well and drawn by steady hands. How he hates the calm pleasures of the ticket-taker, the barker, and the acrobat, the mocking pleasure of the clowns, the false ones of the illusionists, the weeping pleasures of the freaks! Only the tattooist decorates his pleasure to suit him, his grim smiling quiet stitchery always peeked at in a mirror, with its sweet frosting of blood, poised between memory and infection and underscored with an infectious memory of pain.
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