POOR PINOCCHIO
I guess if you think about it,
Pinocchio had a troubled childhood.
I mean, wouldn’t you feel a
little confused if
your best friend were a cricket,
you were held prisoner by a greedy puppeteer,
had your nose grow 12 ft.,
nearly turned into a donkey,
and swallowed by a whale
before you were 10?
It must have had some impact to know
that he was a block of wood
before a fairy turned him
into a boy.
As an adult,
he probably had
2 or 3 troubled marriages,
a bad job as a postal worker,
dysfunctional relationships with his kids,
and at least one midlife crisis.
I bet at one point or another,
he wished that he were still a puppet,
that his limbs, his thoughts, his life
were still controlled by Gepetto’s strings
I am sure he would have
asked his fairy godmother,
Hey! Why didn’t you tell me
about all the stuff that people go through?!?
or he would have called on the
counsel of Jiminy Cricket,
had he not accidentally
crushed him underfoot
one sunny afternoon when he was 12.
Oh, Poor Pinocchio
perhaps it is better to be a puppet
Maybe he would finally have gone crazy,
blowing away his boss and
17 innocent bystanders with an AK-47
after thinking about Jiminy Cricket,
and browsing through a copy of Soldier of Fortune
I would read in the paper
of the 3 hour standoff,
how he made a bonfire
out of the outgoing mail,
and began to plaster
sets of collector stamps over the walls
“Sort This! Deliver That!
I’m gonna Make You All Pay!!”
he would begin to shout before
he would finally be shot by a sniper
On the way to the hospital,
he’d mumble of his fear
that he had disappointed
his fairy godmother.
—from Rattle #9, Summer 1998
Tribute to Children
