Freaks: I

"Nothing is ever the same as they said it was. It’s what I’ve never seen before that I recognize."–Diane Arbus (in Diane Arbus, the Aperture monograph, 1972)

There can’t be any argument about what exists.
There are so many variations on the human.
There’s the merman with his gills in a fish tank. Happy?
Are you? Is the world? What do you think will happen now
that the bomb has spawned its breed of Japanese despair?
And not a doubt the fission will continue elsewhere.
Here’s the bearded lady. There’s the hermaphrodite.
I don’t even bother asking anymore, I simply see what there is.
In my next life I will look around and try to find
the opposite, the perfectly human with all its flaws buried inside.
All this is perfectly normal. To me. I was born
without a blemish, coddled and spoiled, one of the rich.
I know why I’m drawn to see what I can’t understand.
I have a bomb ticking in me that I want to stop.
I like to listen to them tell me what I am not.
The lady sword swallower is lovely and in love
with this blade she may feel can mimick a loving man.
Then there are the strippers who let men’s tongues make them hot.
They are the most like me, yet even so I have sex
life enough to spur me to ponder the horse I have.

(5 November 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander