by Kevin T McEneaney
When I was a confused ten-year-old,
there were two dimensions in my life:
I played football with multiple concussions
and my elbow shattered into thirty shards;
the other person in my head
read Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
(the only “children’s book” in the house).
I didn’t know what micturate meant
because it wasn’t in my dictionary.
Mother brought out the foot-thick
giant Webster dictionary.
I was, of course, embarrassed.
*
I couldn’t understand Swift’s third part,
being too young for philosophic satire,
yet when I entered the land of the Yahoos,
I knew that I had discovered reality,
the reality that underpinned adult life
which I would have to cope with
until there was no more life.
