Here is another sex poem of a different kind, a sad kind,
I guess.
I met in Oshkosh of all places a ventriloquist, a young girl
from a very rich family.
And she considered that she was a failure of the family.
The father had the big Cadillac that I mentioned in the poem,
and the brother was a tremendous student.
And she had flunked rhetoric three times.
And she tried to compensate by talking to this dummy who
became her alter ego.
She tried to convince us that, actually became so simpatico
with the dummy that the dummy actually talked through her,
talked.
He assumed her completely so that he became kind of alive.
I fabricated it at the ending to show
that he becomes not only the alter ego but also her lover
that she takes to bed with her.
Became symbolically that much of an identity with her.
She couldn't trust anyone else.
So it just becomes a sexual love object.
She never grew beyond the doll stage.
And here she has a perfect mate, the doll.
She can tell the doll anything she wants it to.
And it'll answer her anything that she wants.
"The Ventriloquist".
"She claims before the 20 executives
laughing at the dummy banter that he
had assumed her completely.
The wooden youngster mimics her echoes.
She spies her boy pull off a performance,
his sacred hour come round at last.
A touch of obscene red hair, the Buster Brown shoe
with the hole.
She remembers her part, the confession.
Brother is Dean's list at MIT.
And father steers a great dark Cadillac.
She is a skeleton in the family tree.
All night she cries between perfumed sheets,
cuddling the dummy to her heaving thighs.
Sexless and stiff, he lies speechless,
unviolated, still her only lover."