The imaginings of elephants
manhandle and abuse me.
Elephants are normally loving,
sensitive, and delicate, trunks
more prehensile than my hands,
flap-ears alert to slights too shy
to embarrass clods like me.

But in their imaginations
they impale me on iron spikes
forged in the days of the British Raj,
batter me with the trunks of trees,
toss me over their shoulders,
and, unfolding great fire hoses,
flush me down the Euphrates,
Lena, Yellow, and Blue Nile Rivers,
sanding me flat against the stones.

I’ve never knowingly committed
a crime against elephants
except by studying piano
when young enough to identify
with Franz Liszt being showered
with gross Victorian bouquets.
At first I thought the keys plastic,
but when I heard some pervert
had sliced them from elephant tusk
I failed to quit the instrument.

Elephant imaginations felt
my childish indifference, weighed it,
found it unforgivable. Now
the darks of Africa, India,
and the bleak haunted sea between
flow over my sorry carcass,
and the stomping of the elephants,
with stubborn jazz persistence, rhymes
with every squeak of protest.