Viagra by Molly Parkin. (Beckham nude is not enough)

"... even David Beckham with his
show-off, lolly-popper-chopper
wouldn’t find a welcome in my now-single bed."

Molly Parkin read this poem at the Poetry Olympics Enlightenment festival last Friday, September 11, at Chelsea Town Hall, marking the 50th anniversary of Michael Horovitz's New Departures - the "groundbreaking poetry publisher-cum-multimedic bardmobile". Click the link for other planned events.



Viagra by Molly Parkin

I went to my doctor for Viagra.
Two years and a bit before my 80th birthday.
She suggested I may not care for the side-effects,
a chronic headache at the base of the skull
for a full week,
and (here’s where she put me off)
uncontrollable, incontinent, diarrheoa>>>
meaning to say that I could expect
a shit in the middle of the shag.
“I graciously decline, doctor”, I said
“Wise decision, dear,” she replied with a smile.
“You’ve already pleasured the male population
of entire continents, and how!
What about giving others a crack of the whip now.”

I’d gone on the suggestion of a young taxi driver
who was servicing an elderly lady, former fare
from Belgravia to Brixton, where
he’d dropped her off at her toyboy,
a teenage drummer from Illinois.
She was on Viagra, so the taxi driver
got in on the act.
Now the two of them have made the pact,
the driver and the Belgravia dame
torrid screws around the clock.
But a firm friendship, all the same
he’s tried his own Viagra share
“a stiffie up for a fortnight,
a fucking nightmare,
trying to fit it under the steering wheel,
firm as rock, hard as steel."

But, as to me, I’ve lost the sexual urge.
Since my Las Vegas screw, the final splurge.
My doctor says it’s diminishing hormones.
And I did sense sediments showering my shoes
where these hormones must have exited my extremities,
leaving no stain of former hedonistic excess,
rendering me impervious to the opposite sex.
Such that even David Beckham with his
show-off, lolly-popper-chopper
wouldn’t find a welcome in my now-single bed.
My chosen companion being cocoa instead.

September.2009