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In the powder room beside the stairs
I keep a portrait of Marilyn.
Not a Warhol original but
one of those cheap museum prints
I bought instead of a magnet.
The tree frog who lives in that room
sits on the picture frame and grins,
groin chakra exploding. Sometimes he
shifts to the book in the window sill
so he can give her come hither looks.
At night when the other insects
and rodents come out to play
Mr Frog uses his skills in camouflage
to blend into the blue shadow
of Marilyn’s eyes. It’s a kind of love
mirage with sneaky undertones
of lust because I’ve heard him emit
mating calls – jackhammerish –
when he should be out there
looking for a pond to cast his frothy net.
Instead, he’s jerking off to cosmic dust
and when other frogs try to enter the chamber
Mr Frog squirts them with projectile
pee. He’s possessive of his queen.
The house understands —
she’s his Norma Jean. But of late
Mr Frog has displayed
erratic behaviour. I found him
by the door making a run for it
and yesterday he got as far as the stairs.
He was carrying an edition
of the morning papers,
his skin a bit droopy and sad,
as if all his desires had been purged
from him by an evil (female) mortician.
On the veranda consulting
with his more colourful cousin —
the Malabar gliding frog,
he confessed to a kind of confusion
about these uneven power equations
but insisted on the purity
of his love — how he had never heard
her say no, how all of this was so long ago,
how career breaking, how humiliating.
I’m a good man, really, I am .
And even as Mr Frog escaped
into the wilderness – cries of Me Too
came from the bushes. Ms Bee-eater,
Ms Kingfisher, no one had been spared.
Even as we understood the magnitude
of these allegations, the wind blew
as decision makers do — knocking down
a few trees to appease the crowd
and afterward, restored his green kingdom
as if nothing had ever happened.
