The Animals

  1

After a Reading of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

Cats are peripatetic,
and because they are bisexual,
a study in behavior, that humans,
even the rowdy,
could learn from if time were taken
from fucking her pussy,
the Black Irish gypsy’s,
though cold turkey
is a dish not to be desired
in the event eight toms are too many
for two pussys.
Socrates, laid in his grave two years,
a venerable flame-tipped Siamese,
is busily riding the kharma wheel,
else he would lead me to the shore
purring all the way there and back,
meaning he loves me rowdy or routine:
it’s left for me to know the difference,
though first I must “feel into”
his survivor, Ali Baba Mau-mau,
a giant white as small Socrates’ hair,
the only tom unphased
when philosophers mount his back
hoping this time they can do what they need,
erasing thought for the sake of instincts
wanting only that desire be fulfilled,
and all this I could learn from Mau-mau
merely by exercising the patience
of empathy implanted in eunuchs
assuring that emperor and empress
remain faithful, they are so endowed.

(based on the 1872 first edition)

  2

“ . . . understanding of others depends on capacity to imitate behavior–the imitative response is unconscious: it may coexist with empathy but, unlike sympathy, shares activity or emotion rather than attitude.–also, empathy has objective reference and physical manifestations, e.g., perception by the observer of the mood of a work of art.”
–Theodor Lipps

“The problem of the unconscious in psychology is, according to the forcible statement of Lipps, less a psychological problem than the problem of psychology.
–Sigmund Freud

As I grow older, I fuck less.
Lest I turn up 
in flagrante delicto.
I live alone downstairs
as once I lived upstairs
abandoned years ago
though now I love with the heart
and let my cock rise and fall
obeying its own spur’s will.
Hence the unconscious.

The Black Irish gypsy
takes me to dinner
far from her campfire.
Do you use condoms yet? she asks.
I remind her I bought one once
at twenty-one
and carried it in my wallet for years
untouched. She replies,
I have one in my purse,
would you like me to put it on you?
I answer, Not here,
in the wagon yes but not at dinner,
dear.

In the stable her horses devour hay.
They whinny when she arrives.
They know why I come along
with my member roused and ready.
These horses fuck more than I
and most likely her combined.
We age. She lives upstairs
when not gallivanting the countryside.
She lets me undress and begins.
When she’s finished I begin.
One or the other is always beginnng.
We feel what we do,
but so do cats, dogs, horses, and aardvarks.

She lets me work her up once more.
Neither of us worries the other
with mention of Darwin, Lipps, or Freud.
She has no interest whatsoever
in the old shrinks. Her horses prance
the countryside and take her everywhere.
They must know what she has in mind.
When they get to stay two nights
in a stable their mistress unshackles
saddle and bridle and some day
she knows she will find a colt
among afterbirth’s placenta
and uncut umbilical cord.

(19 June 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander