Four Gallons of
Foreskins
This is a practical poem.
It addresses the foreskin question.
To be or not to be.
That is not what the foreskin asks
itself for unquestionably
it would always take the side of "be."
Nor is it the question of the principle
owner of the foreskin
for he too in all cases that I can
imagine would also
unquestionably
vote for be.
For starters it hurts.
Some say that it is only a little pinch
but in every picture I ever saw of
a boy having it done the boy was
screaming so if their nervous
systems were not sufficiently
developed to feel pain they had
not been informed of the matter.
And at puberty it is even worse.
I always asked myself why so much
screaming in the absence of pain.
I suppose it's puppy pain.
A sort of cute facsimile.
Anyhow we are assured
that in the case of infants the event
cannot be remembered and that may be
true though
we do not know what our cells recall
and pass on to
their successors but assuming that we
do not in any
way whatsoever remember still is that
a good argument
for torture?
And even if the pain issue could be set
aside with a bit of Novocain
most of us are attached to both ends
of our penises and would
feel it to be a loss if any of it was
to be cut away though if it
had to be I am sure we would prefer
that it be the end that is
furthest from us.
To be or not to be is asked neither by
foreskins nor their owners.
It is a question asked only by foreskin
harvesters.
What do they want with all those
foreskins?
That is my question.
Saul asked David for 100 Philistine
foreskins for the hand of Michal.
Let me run that by you again.
100 foreskins.
Try to visualize that.
Did he put them all in a clay jug?
How big of a jug was necessary.
It would seem that 100 foreskins would
be more that a quart by a good deal.
A gallon?
Several gallons.
I suppose that there would be an
empirical way of determining
the matter and would do it myself but
I don't know just
where I would find 100 foreskins as
they are generally
not free for the taking at least by
the likes for me though
some treat them as though they were.
So lets just imagine that they would
amount to about two gallons.
But David didn't just go get 100
foreskins.
He brought in 200 of them.
Lets picture him coming to Saul with
these four gallons of
foreskins which he dumps out onto a
table to be counted.
Try to visualize this.
What exactly was Saul going to do with
them?
Put them on a string and wear them like
a necklace?
Fry them up with some eggs for
breakfast?
He had no refrigerator to keep them in
so they had to be used
quickly.
Let us leave the question of morality
aside for the moment.
Minimally
asking for two gallons of foreskins as a dowry for
your daughter seems like bad taste.
I suppose it could have been a hundred
clitori.
That would only have been a pint or so.
Kings and gods have an appetite
for clitori too so I suppose
it could have been but this was a
dowry with which to buy
a young woman and maybe even gods and
kings are not
so tasteless
as to demand a pint of clitori on such an occasion.
She might have watched them being
counted out on the table which
would not have
inspired in her much confidence in her
husband-to-be or in any man for that
matter.
Even though it was foreskins and not
clitori being bought for four
gallons of them would surely have have
played havoc
with her self image.
David bringing Saul the foreskins is a
sacred story.
Is God then, capable of bad taste?
If not then there is something He is
not capable of and from that it could
be argued that He was less than God
but perhaps His being
capable of bad taste might lead in the
same direction.
A logical quandary.
The evidence of the senses though is
that the question of bad taste has
never carried great weight in the
strategies of creation this
being the case whether the unfolding
of things be conceived
of as a divine act or a huge
accidental burp with random effects.
Have you ever looked at goose poop?
Which leaves the matter of the
Godliness of God unresolved as
well as the question of what such a
dowry did to the self-image
of Saul's daughter.
But this is a practical poem.
It does not presume to judge the
absolute nor to psychoanalyze the dead.
I read somewhere that baby foreskins
can be sliced in such a manner
that they produce yards of material
that is very good for grafting
onto burns.
Imagine yourself wrapped in a baby's
foreskin.
What does that symbolize?
Never have I been so reluctant to
pursue the tracks of a promising
metaphor to discover what rough beast
might be leaving them
on his way to someone's dooryard.
Surely an image that bizarre
and original must be a metaphor pointing
to some high and arcane truth but I am
sure I don't know what it
is though it does give me a sort of
cozy feeling.
It's a metaphor in search of a meaning.
Paul enjoins us to circumcise our
minds.
Visualize that.
I read a newspaper article recently
about about a mother who took
a pair of scissors
and cut off the end of her son's tongue
and I felt pity for her and for him
too but first for her for
mothers do not like to be so out of
control.
If only she had understood that she did
not need to control him
it would have been so much simpler.
She did it because she could not make
him stop sassing her.
She did not like what he did with his
tongue.
What do boys do with their penises that
we don't like
if we let them they do as they please?
Perhaps we
Using this collective pronoun to mean
all of us gathered
together like a slime mold during its
fruiting days
when it prepares to spread its clones...
Gathered so that in our togetherness we
can overcome the
will of individuals because of our
vastly superior
numbers and presumed superior morality
forgetting
that only occasionally
does we occupy the high ground,
Are sometimes less than clear as to why
we would want to collect of
all things foreskins.
Circumcision is high on that long and
dishonorable
list of things that we might do as we
but never as I.
Not as high perhaps as napalm or
depleted uranium or starving
whole populations by destroying the
infrastructure of their
country but still pretty close because
would you for instance
on your own take your child into a
back room and cut off
part of his or her body just because
it offended you.
Would you pluck out an eye for fear of
what it might see or
cut off part of a penis for fear of
what it might do?
What are we to make of this hunger of
kings and gods for foreskins?
Perhaps it is just that the collective
we which is what gods and
kings are usually about simply doesn't
want lots of irresponsible
boys walking around with them.
Perhaps it was well stated in the late
19th century by the respected
physician Dr. C. W. Cockshut and I'm
not kidding about his name.
Admitting that
circumcision dulled the erotic response he went on to
say that this was
exactly as it should be even though it was
against nature
because:
Nature intends that the adolescent
male shall copulate as
often and as promiscuously as
possible and to that
end covers the sensitive glans so
that it shall be ever
ready to receive stimuli.
Civilization on the contrary
requires chastity and the glans
of the circumcised rapidly assume a
leathery texture
less sensitive than skin.
Thus the adolescent has his
attention drawn to his penis
much less often.
So there it is unadorned from Dr.
Cockshut himself who after all had
to do something to compensate for a
name like that but I
think he was telling the truth not
about how it is needed but
about why it is done despite the
window dressing talk about
health and the will of god whose name
I spell without a
capital when he/she is saying
something really stupid,
I come away from this meditation with
nothing of cosmic
dimensions nothing that we could wrap
up in like a
babies foreskin to give us comfort
from the cold wind of
ideas and dimensions beyond our grasp.
Only a meager offering I bring to you
--
Something quite mundane.
A simple injunction.
Not even poetry.
We should not be hacking on each
other's genitals.
At least that can be said.