How I became Barbie
My body is Ezra Pound’s
My body is Goofy
My body is Marilyn Monroe
My body is a tree’s body
My body is Billie Holiday’s body
My body is a mollusk
a veranda
My body is, like the sky, only an idea
My body is the entrance to a cave
My body is a Lascaux of Happy Meals
My body is a streetcar
My body is Oprah Winfrey’s
My body is petrochemical
of Blackbeard the pirate or Johnny Depp
of Lady Gaga, Jackie Robinson, a Lada
My body is Lassie Come Home
My body is Lassie’s
My body is the body of Golda Meir
of Heidi Klum and of Seal
My thighs are cream cheese
fried egg, lax
I have Twiggy’s body
I have the body of Walt Whitman
My body is Spanish Colonial gold coins
the body of Venus de Milo
of her arms
My body is always outside
My body lies over the ocean, in a trunk
My body is Virginia Woolf’s
My body is D. radiodurans
My body is Leopold Bloom’s
My body is Queen Victoria’s body
My body is Friedrich Nietzsche’s body
when at rest is Albert Einstein’s body
when dancing, Sir Isaac Newton’s or Martha Graham’s
My body is James Brown, John Brown, Valerie Bertinelli
My body is the Venus of Willendorf
is Arnold Schwarzenegger
My body is Barbie
* * *
And while we're talking bodies: Here's a recording of the Spoken noire "A Body in the Trunk," by Kerry Schooley and BumpHEAD.
Comments
I got this image of humans as screens upon which television reflects its funny melange of imagery, of bodies.
Your poem told me we are really the television screens and the thing we call the television screen is the real body.
The real bodies.
I love that you included Valerie Bertinelli.
I have spent the past week worrying about the body dysmorphia of clouds.
The way the clouds can't stop looking in mirrors.
And forcing themselves to change.
Thanks for dropping by & for linking, William. The cloud and TV images are brillig.