Marlon Brando's Iguana
by Daniel Van Thomas

all day I have been thinking of marlon brando's iguana

; this began last night, dreaming it up (jesus knows)
where I'm living in a redbrick studio flat alone in a tex-mex desert
& here comes brando knocking--but bald & fat in this here dream-present
not the fugitive kind or the wild one
but old dr moreau past his prime & phoning it in--
in his sky blue polyester suit & open collar
he says to me, he says:I need you to watch for me my pet iguana

alright?

alright

    so the thing comes walking in, & itsa dragon.

    I mean, this is a huge iguana.

It's man-sized & I don't know what the hell I'm going to do with it,
but marlon's gone fuckknowswhere by the time I even know I have a
question. (this is starting to become like the time I water-dreamed
that a tabby cat with fat eyes wrote the complete works of the bard.)
.anyway.

this chartreuse kimono dragon is prowling my hardwood floors, tail
aswingin, doing that fearful thing where a reptile opens & closes its
toothless pink mouth completely noiselessly--wrst of all, looking
right at you like it plans on eating you (& this thing could) & this
repeated moment of me being a prisoner in my own imaginary loft
crystallizes into the one apex moment where I realize I don't even
have any iguana food. SO.

in my good suit (one)I run thru the desert to the catholic high school
were my sister is having a costume ball, passing by the pink bathroom
for little people which for some reason has a peephole on the outside
& then passing george hw bush giving some sort of lecture for honor
students in a cowboy hat to find my sister, who I think for baseless
reasons might have access to or know someone who otherwise has access
to iguana food. why am I dreaming this?, (I'm asking this not in the
dream but now)

maybe I was thinking about Tennessee Williams yesterday.

& in thinking of Tennessee Williams
    I thought on the Night of the Iguana--
& in thinking of Tennessee Williams
    I thought also on his friend, the actor Marlon Brando--

SO. I pass by the devil at this teenage masquerade (actually I held
the door for him just out of habit) but before I find my sister I
realize I am late for my job which is incidentally serving as an
auctioneer at an ongoing auction of marlon brando memorabilia which at
this point consists of sub-worthless stuff such as his cookbook & for
whatever reason an old high school football jersey (not his) from my
high school that may or may not have been signed by the apparently
lizard-loving man in question but I'm behind the podium shilling these
sorts of things when I get so caught up in the moment of selling a
paperback copy of the merchant of Venice that may or may not have
belonged to brando that I auction off some of his left-over iguana
food without remembering that I need it to feed his massive pet iguana
who is currently residing in my homestead living presumably like smaug
the dragon in the book the hobbit lounging on my own personal mountain
of comfortable domestic treasures

so.

with no real resolution to my predicament,
I go back to my relatively trendy-for-the-desert-anyway bachelor pad &
bodily remove the beast from my floor to its tank, which he takes up
the entirety of, as though you yourself who might for some strange
reason be reading this were put bodily into a large fishtank--but he
says to me from this tank (he says) in this urbane & resonant
debutante voice that there was no need for all that & he could've just
got in himself if only I had asked, & he'll just take that banana I'm
eating, & would I please close the top on the tank on my way out,
thanks.
so I did,
& he just lounges there

like nothing ever happened,

like somesorta storybook

maharajah in silks



About the author:
Daniel Van Thomas is a 24 year old poet, ditchdigger, actor, & ex-deckhand. Outside of barns, radios, & bars, his poems have appeared in the journals Elimae, Chrysalis, & Notations. A child of Kentucky, he currently lives in the Eagle Rock area of Los Angeles.


© 2009 Daniel Van Thomas