True Story
True Story - meaning Summary
Self-mutilation as Protest
The poem recounts a man found walking along a freeway after cutting off his genitals and carrying them in his pockets. Medical attempts to reattach them fail because the detached parts are "contented." The speaker reads the act as a desperate, solitary protest—against exploitation, indifference, or a brutal world—and laments how such personal rebellion is ignored amid everyday news. The closing blessing is quietly empathetic.
Read Complete AnalysesThey found him walking along the freeway all red in front. He had taken a rusty tin can and cut off his sexual machinery, as if to say, "See what you've done to me? You might as well have the rest." And he put part of him in one pocket and part of him in another, and that's how they found him, walking along. They gave him over to the doctors who tried to sew the parts back on, but the parts were quite contented the way they were. I think sometimes of all of the good ass turned over to the monsters of the world. Maybe it was his protest against this or his protest against everything. A one-man Freedom March that never squeezed in between the concert reviews and the baseball scores. God, or somebody, bless him.
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