Mike Bagwell

Skypenis of the Air

From The Skypenis Sagas

—Draw a giant penis. That would be awesome.
—What did you do on your flight?
  Oh, we turned dinosaurs into sky penises.

Begins the real conversation between two
as yet unnamed Navy aviators who are about
to draw, you guessed it, a giant penis
with their jet’s contrails
somewhere out over Washington State’s airspace.

Thinking in clouds is as old as thinking,
but art is as new as a world war.

That was November of 2017, at least six years
after my Skypenis first emerged,
rearing its head up out of ink.
I remember the aviation event itself vaguely,
but didn’t connect it to these sagas
and didn't think of it again at all
until this month or so, circa June 2024,
as this collection nears completion.

I feel the urge to say
that my Skypenis is bigger and better,
girthier, longer, harder, able to plunge
to deeper depths and remain, and so on,
an impulsive need to compare and defend.
But it's damn difficult to compete
with that dinosaur line.
Or aeronautical art generally.

A woman steps back from the halal cart line
holding her children's hands, looks up
at the sky in abject horror,
covers their eyes but still they see.
“What is that Mommy?” one child asks,
and she fears that she must say.
“Is that a giant cock in the clouds?”
asks the halal cart guy.

—Balls are going to be a little lopsided.
  Balls are complete. I just gotta navigate
  a little bit over here for the shaft.
—Which way is the shaft going?
—The shaft will go to the left.
—It’s gonna be a wide shaft.
—I don’t wanna make it just like 3 balls.
—Let’s do it.
  Oh, the head of that penis
  is going to be thick.

I wondered about even writing this poem.
I don't want these sagas to be reducible
to meme poetry, or at least to a single meme,
but the halal cart detail really tied the penis—
I mean poem—together.

A signifier, for what?
Skypenis boils the kingdom of the clouds.
A too-perfect detail is that
after seeing that their new penis isn’t dissipating,
the pilot and EWO panick, frantically
trying to obfuscate their design by
crossing it out with more layers
of contrail.

It’s a great metaphor for Lacan’s
symbolic castration, for the castration
of Uranus, and of all the sky gods
before him.

Let’s say The Cumulus Kid and Mr. Kolaptō
were the unnamed artists, let's say you picture
this perfect penis of clouds
and from there, it’s up to you.