I have not been an elephant dung shoveller
All my life. I try hard to keep appearances.
I exfoliate, anoint myself with lotions

Scented with essence of cedar, rosemary verbenone.
But the smell is a sycophant.
I’m infused, it delves into every pore

As it delved into my father’s hands:
Dual butt steaks clasped round
His father’s father’s heirloom broom

As he explained the tired history behind every nick.
Standardized testing predicted
A future altogether otherwise,

And now my wife pesters me
To ask for a promotion, a raise.
Her bedtime rants fall down like acid rain.

Nor are the elephants jolly.
Noah’s upstarts, flatulent, self-absorbed,
Bourgeois to a fault. Their demands petty–

Leafs thoroughly de-veined,
Toenails painted to match tusks,
Bidding me to come scratch their hides

Erupting with short, coarse fibers
That end up leaving my hands
Chafed red flags of surrender.

Gods of cheap thrills!
Why not a manager who oversees a marble factory?
Or a Navy Seal who leaps from helicopters all day?

An organizer of underground cock fights?
Inherit the deed to an emerald mine in Madagascar?
It was not to be. Friends, take no pity,

For I have amassed a rather impressive
Collection of elephant folklore
For which I hope to find a suitable publisher.

I also supply the elephants with daily
Dietary aphorisms I’ve coined,
Which, too, may find an audience of the future–

One I’ve dreamt, time and again
And which must exist, borne in my head,
So long as I navigate this white jungle, these biting flies.

I counted many beans: pinto, navy, garbanzo.
I swallowed my purple pill
Followed by my yellow pill

Before leaving the house with my game face.
I gave the finger to a tailgating Cherokee,
And prayed he wasn’t deranged, packing heat.

I gave blood, which they promptly rejected;
It was, they told me, the wrong kind.

I slept with my ex but was somewhere else.
She was somewhere else, too,
In that secret fold each of us fed.

In an elevator, trapped between floors,
I gnawed off my foot. I didn’t even have to.

Wrote a letter full of vitriol,
Another, of rain.

Ate a plum. Then ate another one.
Then I ate a third, in accordance
With the law of diminishing returns.

I sprayed the medflies with malathion
While negotiating with the hijackers.

I knelt before a likeness of Buddha Ratnasambhava
While slowly strangling a paparazzo.

I parlayed a risky venture
Into a virtual windfall,
Then lost the deed to the ranch.

Before going to bed, reflected on
A stray dog I had petted
Who would one day eventually betray me.