Baby’s first words

The two year old baby boy rolled by 

like a yellow, blue-eyed tumbleweed of trickery; 
mother looked down

cracked the whip with her eyes, 

made his bed with her voice and said: “MIND!” 

The whip missed 

the bed covers flew off,

he looked up with his two blue two
year old eyes, said: "YES!

I have one. And while I do love you, 

I'm ignoring you!” 

He rolled on and out of sight 

towards his talkative future. 

Out there, in here ... out there!

They say, “Put yourself out there!”

What’s out there is Fun Popularity. 

It’s bright and orange-colored, 

like a plastic hamburger. 

In here, there’s no walls or ceilings

(it’s not a community center, not the Oscars) 

but there’s a silvery blue velvet light

you can see no end of. 

Green mossy rocks underwater 

under feet 

forever. 

No bullet points anywhere 
to be seen

or even checked off. 

You can control out there a little

in here, not at all. 

I was a baby and 

like all babies born wild, 

out of control. 

It’s too late to workshop the baby now. 

Who’s your Dada?

(Nobody’s getting famous 

around here)

61 today, the sexily graying at the temples busboy

buses his last table and clocks out 

in the kitchen. 

See you tomorrow, says someone, theoretically

his boss. 

That’ll be the fucking day, says the busboy.

You’re fired! (the boss) For profanity! 

That’s more like it! (busboy) For perpetuity, too, I hope!

The busboy takes the subway uptown to Juilliard 
and applies for a job: Cello, First Chair. (Or, male chanteuse.)  

Amazingly, after the paperwork, he has an interview 

in five minutes. 

The music department chair pulls one up

and asks 

Can you tell me what a flatted fifth is? 

Oui Madame, I can (says the ex-busboy). 

It’s when you throw a gin bottle out the window

on the West Side Highway. 

You’re hired (says the musical chair).

Can you tell me something about yourself? 

I was fired an hour ago. 

Mon Dieu! Why would you tell me that?

So I can rhyme the end of this poem. 

Oh, I see. Fired, and hired. Good.

When do I begin?

Now.

The end. (Or is it?) 

Last therapy session 

at 30,000 feet,

and dropping 

We arranged for it to happen on a jet plane

both of us going to San Francisco

on the same day

(my psychotherapist for the Gay Pride Parade, me

for the reenactment of the Great 1906 Earthquake)

but five minutes after 

we started the session up there

tray tables down, jet swung out over the sea

(me misty, our final session, 

him taking notes)

the Fasten Seat Belt light came on in RED

the jet ding-donged disaster 

and the pilot said we were going

down. 

Lots of smoke out the window

we strapped in, scared stewardesses

turned Pacific-blue in the face

(cleverly color-coordinating the collision)

and my shrink asked one last question:

“Did your mother read to you when you were a kid?”

“Yes,” I said. “The Riot Act.”

He said, at 500 feet:

“Well, I can see why you're holding onto hating

her as hard as you're holding onto your tray table.

Oh, you probably should put that table up. So, 

have we've reached closure?”

“I’ll say,” I said at 100 feet. “In more ways than one.” 

Fuck the AARP 

Zero to sixty in six decades 

and I’ve still got it floored; 

I’ll get it up to 100 

if I don’t get pulled over. 

Pants in the Pines, Part 1

The woman who said she was my mother

took me down to Macy’s 

the goddamn White Sale, of all things 

went almost all the way inside 

the fitting room with me, where she had one,

then she bought me yellow On sale! polyester slacks. 

Naturally I didn’t like it, she said:

Simmer down!

I kept talking anyway, drowning out

her sad sad sad sad silence staring ahead at 

her sad sad sad sad past.

But I had my hidden Red Corduroys.

That’s right, red corduroys! 

Up on the roof of the Holiday Inn  
up the street from our apartments
in a trash bag, tucked behind humming metal boxes,

some sort of heating & cooling equipment.

“Mom” ironed and laid out the polyester pants 

then, being a little laid-out herself,
she laid out and went to sleep. 

I snuck out of the apartment in moonlight,

climbed up the decorative white cinder block wall

of the Holiday Inn; climbed around the green-glowing
Holiday Inn sign, feet and hands in the honeycomb
design, got the hidden pants, climbed back down,
back home, back in my bedroom;

my cell down the hall from her sherry-flavored

snoring

and then, 

starting to snow ... 

I opened the bedroom window, took aim,

threw my pants into the pine tree outside. 

They landed in the top branch, hung there 

a second, slid off, down down down

to the ground, up against the trunk. 
I waved at my pants: see you in the morning. 

Awake at 6 a.m.; the Today Show coming through

the cardboard doll house walls; breakfast 
with Mrs. Mother (I think that was her name), we shared
blue-yolk eggs and lard-oozy bacon; out the door and down
under the pine tree; 30 degrees, early blue morning light. 

Yellow polyester off, static popping on my teen-boy thighs 
blue in the cold, school bus headlights flashing me, BUT! 

Then, the RED Corduroys. 

Wide wale wild and on the way to school! 

Where I got beat up and flunked anyway

but this was just the beginning.  

Later, I’d learn a lot, drink a lot,

sober up, look back clearly.

But back then, that morning

and a few more years of them,

with the help of the pines

these pants—these red corduroys  

would walk me away.

Mona Lisa on the loose

The Mona Lisa Smile is mysterious, 
he said? No. It's not true. 
Only a curator would say that,

at the head of the family dinner table
no one else moving. 

Mona wasn’t being ethereal 
mysterious 
or even “Earth Mother-esque” 

(I heard that one in a midwestern “school”). 

The Mona Lisa smile was for a guy 

like Harvey Weinstein. 
And all those other nice guys
in disguise. 

That’s a damn confident smile, 

that Mona Lisa smile. 

As in, 

"Hey, you slimy sexist rapist

bar mat of a man, Hey 
Jerkoff—and it turns out that

I mean that literally—you may be 

a big hot shot Hollywood producer 
but who’s in the Louvre?"