Eulogy on the Death of Dickie Dickinson

Eulogy
On the Death
Of Dickie Dickinson

(Who Weighed In at 335 Pounds)


 

If you think Dickie had piggy eyes
You should have known his family ---
Made up of gods eating boulders
Plumbed on the very verge of the forest.

Dickie (and his equally seized brother Angie)
Were the original gloomy gods of chance ---
Eating, for snacks, a thousand tons or so of
Victorian lace panties, and, for dessert,
An entire platoon of silky parachutes:
Sweets billowing in and out like clouds.

It was a long and desperate war of attrition:
Shoulder attacking haunch, overwhelming thighs,
Pillow arms stacked atop pillow legs
And that tiny fishhead of love nestled somewhere
There among the buns and dozen or so
Bedimpled thighs of white marble veins of basalt.

There was nothing outside the sounds of naked love
To describe the flap of this fat fornication
The rich fat yellowed sauces of desire dribbling away.
And, all the while, hidden in the folds of their tums
Lived trolls and fairies, demigods out of the Black Forest,
Filling testicles with their puffed-up cries of hunger.

Faced with such roly-poly gods, our own passions
Turned inside-out, got screwed up like hot trombones;
Our hidden eyes dripped great golden honey-rolls,
Flesh captured itself in mountains of hunger
Volcano-bowls of sadness were left under the plumes.

A mammal's age now stretches the rivers between us.
Eyes huge as white stones roll along the faults.
What's left of the nights eats into our days
(And our nightmares).
Fat (not fate)
explains why
you and I
are here
At all.

©1972 by the G. J. Fogerty Trust

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