THE HUMAN SPECIES Poem by William Cliff

human beings are mammals (for that's the way
they style themselves among the taxonomic classes)
who on the surface of the earth today
form astonishing masses

with their hind paws at one end
they look bizarre when they stand erect
and that makes their backbones bend
and gives their posture a stooped effect

the women have only two breasts side by side
that they give their young to feed from
to nourish them and that they don't hide
but like to display on their chest prom-

inently and as for the male he is very proud
of his virile member and his testicles
with which he is endowed
and wants admiration for his genitals

the body of man is without a covering of fur
and that causes him to get dressed
to avoid the cold weather
making him sorry he's not as hairy as the rest

and even in hot regions
man covers his private parts
because if he showed them to others
it might make them dry up.

if I began to write
this poem in stanzas with a classic look
it's because of a photograph
that I saw once in a reference book

in which you see a man
wearing a simple loin-cloth
lowering the inflammation and ulceration
of his brown skin into the filthy froth

of murky water at Bhubaneswar
a city of the Asian east
where the sight of that human avatar
was for me shocking to say the least

this animal that goes down sadly
into this water troubles me
because it shows that it is weary
of what makes its head so heavy

and that he hoped to alleviate the effect
by plunging it in that water where
the nearby temples all reflect
their black and red grooves

then I had a dream about our kind
and the strangeness that we encapsulate
so that I had to write some lines
with all these words that resonate

with their syllables in thus putting a name
to the thing that hits me in the face
considering that I myself am in this frame
I am a member of this race

that has a highly developed head
that's heavy to carry on certain days
and that we always have to swell
in spite of the fact that it never pays

in our thinking about our kind
we ought to learn to be grateful for
this brain that leads us with our mind
toward the desires of the future