Mr. Mitty masturbates
Most Monday mornings,
Manipulating medium manhood
Modestly, maintaining
Moderate motions,
Mouthing muttered moans,
Mercurially measuring
Memorised models
Mechanically massaging
Monumental moist mammaries
Mimicking megastar
Marilyn Monroe.
Grayson Ellis, 1973
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Deflation’
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2 comments:
Thank you so much, Janice, for sharing this one. The memories!
I remember we used to secretly pass this one round at school (Eton, 71-79) as 'smut', as we did with the ones featuring Larkin's more 'industrial' language shall we say.
Now of course I can appreciate the prodigious aesthetic and technical values of the poem - all quite lost on an excitable schoolboy back in the mid seventies!
Thank you so much for you comment, Mr. Tippett. I question your use of the term ‘smut’, though I would agree that it is one of Grayson’s more playful poems and probably lacking in biographical bite.
As you astutely mention Larkin, I would point out that the influence cannot be underestimated, though I cannot recollect a poem where Larkin was quite so wedded to a conceit such as this.
I don’t like to speak for Grayson but I doubt if he ever intended this poem to see the inside of Eton. He lived for a while among the sheep farmers of Shropshire where this kind of verse has been popular for centuries.
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