The Penis List

Jim Behrle was recently featured in “Kill List” as a comfortable poet. It’s possible that he is the least famous poet to earn such a distinction. He lives in Jersey City, NJ. By day he wears a green t-shirt and a nametag at a university bookstore, fetching textbooks for people with bright futures. He lives his broken dreams, a famous internet poetry troll, he’s probably better known for crap like “Best American Poetry: The Cartoon”, “Stone Cold Poetry Bitches” and “What the Hell is Up With Your Author Photo?” Behrle really has to get more of that Ruth Lilly money somehow.

by Jim Behrle

Jim Behrle has a half inch penis
The Kill List Kid has a three inch penis
Vanessa Place has a six inch penis
Billy Collins has a four inch penis

The Poetry Foundation has a $100 million penis
But Poetry Magazine has a two inch penis
Your iphone is a mile long penis that’s
Always secretly fucking you

When you look at your iphone think “penis”
Google is a huge penis sticking out of
Everything everywhere
And where ever you go you bump into them all

Poetry is a huge warm wonderful vagina
But everyone treats it like a narrow
Tight, unbreakable asshole that only
One penis at a time can fit in so

You’ve got to out-penis everyone else
Manhattan and Brooklyn take an inch off
America’s penis is old and gross
But we’re working on it now 

The internet takes a half
Inch off your penis, snip, snip
Let’s just cut off all penises
Or yank them all out by the root

What will survive is love
And penises usually fuck that up, too

Kafka once wrote “We are incapable of loving, only fear excites us.” Behrle quotes this all the time, it is the only thing he’s ever read from Kafka. And he wants to sound smart. This poem began as a long list of poets and their perceived penis lengths but once he got to the line about Billy Collins penis he lost his stomach and turned it into something else. Vanessa Place’s penis on the other hand kills poetry every night, aw yeah. Behrle. . .

note: I’ve started this feature up as a kind of homage and alternative (a companion series, if you will) to the incredible work Alex Dimitrov and the rest of the team at the The Academy of American Poets are doing. I mean it’s astonishing how they are able to get masterpieces of such stature out to the masses on an almost daily basis. But, some poems, though formidable in their own right, aren’t quite right for that pantheon. And, so I’m planning on bridging the gap. A kind of complementary series. Enjoy!