by David Lehman

          I used to have a small cock and a big ego, but then I realized the wisdom of doing things the other way around. Now I concur with Theodore Roosevelt who held that to “walk softly and carry a big stick” was the right idea though he did not always practice it himself. But then no man is at ease with his full-frontal nudity in the long pier glass. The fair sex is repelled by the sight of a disembodied cock or one that is divulged under a man’s great coat like an accessory to a crime. But give a man a look at a woman’s pubic patch and he liken it to the warm springs of a southern resort to which the convalescing athlete repairs for regular treatments. Thank you for the cucumber sandwiches, Gilbert.
          Reading poetry helped lengthen my penis naturally. I used to be a woman, but then I swallowed a concoction consisting of sweetened coconut juice and spunk and I grew a penis. It excited me to mount other men’s neglected wives, and when a girl friend of mine edited a book called “Cock for a Day,” with contributions from ten female authors on what each would do if endowed with a penis for twenty-four hours, I agreed to pen a piece on condition that my own name not appear in print. For my nom de plume I chose Tiresias, or the name Mr. Eliot adopted when he went to live among the women.
          The streetwalker was a great invention, if an ancient one, and served as the prototype for the greatest bourgeois monument. It was the supplement that made marriage bearable, the crack of dawn that made the rooster feel like crowing.
         When Paris was the world capital of whoredom, I always went with Sylvie. Her legs even with heels could not compare to Claudette’s, her eyes and lips were less pleasing than Catherine’s. But Sylvie was a true whore, with a whore’s personality, which confirmed my cockhood and aroused it to majestic heights. She liked the lights on and mirrors everywhere when we fucked. And then she would laugh and vow not to wash until the next time we met, which is what a man wants to hear from a woman after he reluctantly withdraws his spent member from the coziness of her cave.

David Lehman is series editor of The Best American Poetry and editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poetry books include The Daily Mirror, When a Woman Loves a Man, and Yeshiva Boys. His most recent work of creative nonfiction, A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, won the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP in 2010. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City.

*Photo courtesy of JarkkoS.