Oh, boy.
OK.
Oh.
This is I think probably the longest poem I've ever--
longest poem I've ever written.
So they're all going, oh, great.
Good.
I can't get out fast enough.
I watch terrible movies and I love cartoons.
I'm a "Cartoon Network" junkie.
And all cartoons, specifically.
And I used to watch a lot of "Popeye."
I know nobody likes "Popeye."
You think "Popeye" is really old-fashioned.
But "Popeye" is really cool.
And I always wondered about Olive Oyl, what her story was.
Because men were just abusing her left and right.
She was always there.
And who was Sweet Pea?
Whose baby was Sweet Pea?
Who was Sweet Pea's baby daddy?
I don't know.
Sweet Pea just kind of popped up and they passed him around.
I think it was Wimpy, the hamburger guy.
He just had that look in his eye.
Anyway, so this is a poem called "Olive Oyl talks to "People
Magazine'" written in the voice of Olive Oyl who finally sat
down for that long-awaited interview with "People
Magazine."
"If you must know me, first know this.
I was born a bone child, a bleached confusion
of sticks clattering from my mother's womb,
ribs fused gently around a sputtering heart.
No milk moved in the woman who made me,
so I lay in her thin arms sucking the thought of the sea
from her skin.
My father was a stevedore, wrists
of dust, his skinny pink neck bulging with pull and push,
heft and release.
My mother grew weak trying to love him,
searching for the rhythms of water
in the way his sour body folded around sleep,
his demands for sex, more potatoes.
She sat at the window watching real sailors.
He blossomed as her body cramped with me.
He was praying for a boy, muscles he could tame,
a fool who believed he was seaworthy.
But then I came, blanched, sickly,
slick with blood and effort, hair as black and flat
as a seal's.
He never held me and only touched me once,
his fingers tangling in my sparse pubic hair.
Then pulling away, startled, disgusted, thrilled.
Perhaps he hoped I could be a man.
But he went no further, because he only
called himself a sailor.
Early one morning as he helped the crew
unload the Wind Swept, his heart splintered and burst, his body
falling only inches from the sea he swore
to possess before he died, his mouth filled with earth
and chips of wood.
My mother screamed, refused food and followed.
I was left alone in the house of my birth,
a battered wooden shell ravaged by wind and salt.
My wide eyes were trained on the waterline,
watching the rickety ships bob and pivot,
hearing the raw shouts, the thick voices of mariners.
I was still a stick interrupted by knees,
ending in huge feet caged in black shoes.
I pulled my hair tight and looped a red ribbon
through the floppy bun, powdered coy circles on pale cheeks.
I stuffed napkins into the front of my dress
and pranced ashore, a sacrifice of toothpicks.
I wanted the man my father had wanted to be, a man of the sea
drunk, with horizons.
The rumbling one came first.
All sinew and teeth, his arms were
tree trunks, muscles screaming inside stiff cotton clothing.
His real name didn't matter.
The men barked, "Bluto," and the hard syllable
swirled in my head."
It's hard to say that without smiling.
"A look from him would have curled my father,
made my mother rise and press her face against the window.
The helpless air crackled when he was in it, sparks stinging
my skin, currents bristling my hair.
Love made me dance around him, silly with want.
My hard black brogans, clicking on the dock.
My wretched waltz amused, then confused him,
until he could not imagine the night without me.
Grips tightened around my sputtering heart.
No music or tentative fingers.
He took me like a windstorm, left me rattled and sore.
His brash laughter boomed and the crowd
gathered at my window to watch him suck tiny red stars
into the skin of my throat.
He took me propped against the wall, pinned
to the rough wooden floor, in the chipped porcelain bathtub,
against the icebox, from the front,
from behind, with his mouth and with his cock, veined
as a horse's neck.
I wept with love, bled into his cupped hand.
When he left, I went with him, thinner than when I began,
but wanting the sea and that man more than anything.
He passed me to his drooling men, broke me to the bough,
laughed at my longing.
On faraway islands bursting with color I could smell,
he starved me, tied me to tree trunks,
teased my body with wild tigers.
Each night he rewarded my devotion, biting into my skin
with yellow teeth, under center of his name carved
into my skinny soul.
Soon he would love me more than water.
But one raucous midnight while I prayed
no train would come rumbling down the tracks I was tied to,
the ropes loosened and I was swept up by arms I didn't know.
I looked up into a comical squint of eyes,
smelled the briny musk of his panting
and wondered what seas this man had seen.
If Bluto was tidal wave, Popeye was ripple.
Bald, nearly blind, bubble-cheeked,
the rotting pipe teetering on his bottom lip.
My savior, as if I had asked to be saved.
I hated him.
His giddy toothless smile, that stupid giggle,
his bulging cartoon forearms.
When he saw my scars, he blubbered like a baby,
weeping at my histories of torn skin,
not recognizing the signpost of love.
I fell asleep counting while his mouth touched each one.
I had no place for him in my crazy life, yet there he was.
When he loved me, lay me down as if I were a rose,
my wounds found new skin.
I was too beautiful to be me.
But now my life borders on slapstick.
I walk into traps, tumble into rushing rivers,
one-eyed ogres dangle me over spitting volcanoes.
Bluto snatches me from Popeye's bed, slams his want into me,
threatens me with blades.
Popeye gobbles what he can of the Earth and risks
his life to find me, beats Bluto senseless.
Then it all begins again.
My body stretches between them, thinner than ever.
Popeye wants to marry me, make an honest woman out of a hot,
bony stevedore's daughter.
Bluto lights a match, holds it to my nipple.
You ask how I can love them both,
how these bones have carried them for so long.
If you must know, first know this,
I was raised by the water, crafted by these tides.
A sick child, never wise or beautiful.
Whatever I loved, loved the water first.
And I will die possessing these sailing men who fight over
my frail body, craving my flesh and neglecting the sea."