After the Fall: Poems Old and New

Giant Pacific Octopus

Giant Pacific Octopus I live with a Giant Pacific Octopus: he settles himself down beside me on the couch in the evening. With two arms he holds a book that he reads with his single eye: he wears a pair of glasses over it for reading. Two more arms go walking over to the sideboard across the room where the crackers and cheese spread he loves are, and they send back endless canapés, like a conveyor belt. While his mouth is drooling and chomping, another arm comes over and gropes me lightly: it is like a breeze on my balls, that sweet tentacle. Other arms start slipping around my body under my clothes, they wiggle right in, one around my waist, and all over, and down the crack of my ass. I am drawn into his midst where his hot mouth waits for kisses, and I kiss him and make him into a boy as all Giant Pacific Octopuses are really when you take them into your arms. All their arms fluttering around you become everywhere sensations of pleasure. So, his sweet eye looks at me and his little mouth kisses me and I swear he has the body of a Greek god, my Giant Pacific Octopus boychik. So this was what was in store when I first saw him in the aquarium huddled miserably on the rock 109 ignoring the feast of live crabs they put in his windowed swimming pool. You take home a creature like that, who needs love, who is a mess when you meet but who can open up like a flower with petal arms waving around— a beauty— and it is a total pleasure to have him around, even collapsible as he is like a big toy, for as long as he will stay, one night or a lifetime, for as long as god will let you have him. 110 ...