The Elephant Man

The Elephant Man
(after The Elephant Man, a David Lynch Film)


Torchlight, like the yolk of a cracked egg,
trickles down the pockmarked, massive
folds of flesh clinging to a skull
and glints straw stuck in the hair

of a bulbous ear. Breath rattles like air
forced from the folds of ragged bellows.
He spends his days on display
to the gasps and stares of passersby.

Nights, during moments of privacy
allotted him in the squalor of his tent,
he fashions bits of straw into miniature bricks,
and with his mortar of homemade glue,

at the painstaking rate of an inch a year,
raises the walls and spires of his cathedral,
magnificent almost as the mute,
ravishing beauty of his dream.


Larry D. Thomas

Posted over on Right Hand Pointing