I went to a bachelor party last Wednesday nite. We are past the age of hiring naked babes to jump from cakes, so the entertainment was a reading by the Poet-in-Residence at Butler U. Fran (a guy) is a buddy of the 60 year old groom.

He read a number of poems by different poets that touched on various aspects of marriage and manhood. Some were very amusing. I especially got a kick out of Dickhead.

My own coming-of-age was before this word was popularized but I totally identified with the poet's teenage dilemma. I also identify with the description of his mature self ("my weakness is a fact so well established that it makes me calm").

I looked up some other poems by Terry Hoagland. Good stuff.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dickhead To whomever taught me the word dickhead,

I owe a debt of thanks.

It gave me a way of being in the world of men

when I most needed one,

-- when I was pale and scrawny,

naked, goosefleshed

as a plucked chicken

in a supermarket cooler, a poor

-- forked thing stranded in the savage

universe of puberty, where wild

jockstraps flew across the steamy

-- skies of locker rooms,

and everybody fell down laughing

at jokes I didn’t understand.

-- But dickhead was a word as dumb

and democratic as a hammer, an object

you could pick up in your hand,

and swing,

-- saying dickhead this and dickhead that,

a song that meant the world

was yours enough at least

to bang on like a garbage can,

-- and knowing it, and having that

beautiful ugliness always

cocked and loaded in my mind,

protected me and calmed me like a psalm.

-- Now I have myself become

a beautiful ugliness,

--

and my weakness is a fact

so well established that

it makes me calm,

-- and I am calm enough

to be grateful for the lives I

never have to live again;

-- but I remember all the bad old days

back in the world of men,

when everything was serious, mysterious, scary,

hairier and bigger than I was;

--

I recall when flesh

was what I hated, feared

and was excluded from:

-- Hardly knowing what I did,

or what would come of it,

I made a word my friend.

--Terry Hoagland

-- lars (lars@indy.net), May 03, 2003

Answers

Dickhead, Tony Hoagland

-- lars (lars@indy.net), May 03, 2003.

Now that is profound.

-- Gene (notmehere@nowhere.huh), May 05, 2003.