Napoleon Bonaparte's first and most memorable humiliation

I recall reading somewhere

possibly a satirical publication

not a historical document

but an exposé I think

maybe an exaggeration, I don’t know,

that Napoleon was saddled with a humiliatingly skinny penis—

that it was, for whatever reason,

snipped sometime after the postmortem on Saint Helena,

and summarily pickled—

that it was placed in storage

inside a jar of ethyl alcohol,— that it disappeared

for a time, often changing hands before it was found

hidden, unceremoniously in a shallow wooden box

under someone’s bed for chrissake–– and

that it was blackened and shriveled

like a neglected

basque pepper left lying in the road

beneath the island's summer Sun.

(the motivation to write this bizarre exposé

began while listening to Beethoven’s “Eroica,”

largely because the 3rd is the only number in his

symphonic literature that made sense for me

to consider penning an exposé on Napoleon's

humiliatingly small penis, which to this day

remains tucked between fact and fiction,

save for those of us who write things down.)