Lynne GoldsmithEating Tiger Penises: Wish for Virility
Animal Rights Poetry By Lynne Goldsmith From All-Creatures.org

Poems of compassion dedicated to the non-human animals who share this planet with us and the people who fight for them.

Eating Tiger Penises: Wish for Virility
By Lynne Goldsmith

Does it work the other way? I mean
if Tiger eats me, will it grow a head
and a human brain?

Will Tiger lose its stripes
and have its whiskers fall right out

to incorporate more of what it wants
if it eats me whole? I think

of these men, desperate
and dreaming of robustness

I can’t blame
how we all want for something

at some point more, it starts young
in this world that has its way
of saying we’re not enough,

how we need to compare ourselves
to standards making us somehow liked,

more pleasing to the eye somehow,
more ready to fill up cup
till it runneth over

I think of all the ways I want to be
more thirsty, as if that will save me,
more thirsty to never have enough

to become some other thing

there’s no exchanging
the unthinkable. 

©Lynne Goldsmith, 2020 

Go on to: Elegy for the Horses
Return to: Poetry by Lynne Goldsmith
Return to: Animal Rights Poetry