poem

 Dick Tricks

In college I knew a guy named Cochran who could do dick tricks. You had to be well endowed, obviously. Late night, he’d whip it out in front of everyone—fraternity brothers and sorority girls alike—and go through his catalog of phallic machinations. There was the “Sad Turtle”. The “Basset Hound”. The “Gentlemen’s Curtsy”.  He had one called the “Watusi” which I couldn’t ever bear to watch. “Grandma’s Tongue” was a perennial favorite. He would unfurl his redundant scrotal skin into a flat, dry, slightly hairy flap of dirty pink, sort of like your grandma’s tongue when she’s trying to lop up the last of her Sunday peas. The pièce de résistance, however, was a little gem he called the “Heart”. And not the Valentine's Day version. Somehow, via a series of complicated maneuvers he could recreate the precise anatomic configuration of a human heart—the bunched up balls a reasonable approximation of atria and ventricles and the looped shaft a proxy for the emerging aortic root. I was pre med at the time so I could appreciate it. The problem for many such contortionists is that once you finished, it wasn’t always so easy to untangle. So they had to live out their remaining days with heart shaped dicks. As you can imagine this had a deleterious effect on both function and self esteem. Couldn’t piss. Lovemaking was out of the question. You end up afraid to ever ask anyone out. All you are is a late night party trick. A gimmick to roll out when the party started to flag. The psychic damage is off the charts. How could you ever think about anything else? You start to forget you have arms and legs and hair and face. Your mind reels. An entire body distilled down to pure heart. And not even the one that beats. Just the one that feels. 

7/31/23