Someone tells you that, “The government’s been experimenting with pig-men since the ’50s!” And this sets you pondering the progeny of improbable liaisons. You shiver with apocryphal notions that almost seem possible, like the chimeras of untruthful tabloid headlines.
And your thoughts become fun-house mirrors. Reflected back is our human fascination with the occasional destruction of the established order. Yet these same reflections also attest a yearning within us for some kind metamorphosis – a union in which beauty and ugliness are made one by grace.
Meet the amazing half man half pig. He knows himself as both and neither: half man, half pig, half god and beast. He longs, like you, to know himself: a pig risen into manhood or a man descending into pork, like some wild god risking everything to be his own creation.
© John Leax. “Meet the Amazing Half Man Half Pig” from Tabloid Poems. La Porte, IN: WordFarm (2005).
Additional information:
- Pigs as incubators for human organs
- Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation by Marie Darrieussecq
From the Porkopolis Archive:
- Sharon Berg and a poem about Personal Myths
- Artists and poets consider Circe’s porker plot