Each man kills the thing that he loves.
-Oscar Wilde, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks
is a novel
by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs
written in 1945
the title I’m told
comes from a story Burroughs heard on the radio
seems a fire broke out at a circus one day
and the announcer was in near hysterics about it
“…the hippos”, he cried, “were boiled in their tanks…”
and my dad tells a story from around the same time
mid-to-late forties when he was a boy
he lived on a farm they had turkeys he says
turkeys apparently are not all that bright
and that year winter came
and brought snow and brought ice
and the turkeys he says were up in the trees
feet frozen to branches and waddles aquiver
and he and my grandfather had to take hatchets
and hack the poor turkeys out of the trees
and I have no idea what the boiling point for a hippo might be
or how low it must go before turkey feet freeze
but I know water boils
at two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit
and steel will boil at 2900
and Kerouac I know died from years of hard living
and Burroughs lived a long life for a junkie
I know each man kills the thing that he loves
and I know why we always have ham at Thanksgiving.