FLIP FLOPS AND MARY JANES
by Don Share
If there's a bend, I'm going round it.
Nobody wants to die on a train,
but you're reading Best
New Horror when I haven't
even boned up on the old kind.
Hester told you, for example,
that all babies look like their daddies
for the first year so that their fathers
won't kill them. Uh-oh:
Some of us still, looking back,
look like our old man. Is this
why you've turned mean to me
as a rusty old bent nail?
It's hard, granted, for an introvert
to be a parent, and these are bad days.
I can see that, to be a hypochondriac.
I'm just trying to think the truth
in my own mind: the way red
fabric looks great on a woman's
skin... those two fluids, binary
explosives, constitute another foiled
plot: one's basic hurt. "It's Murphy's
Law, whatevs..." says a fellow passenger
going, like me, absolutely nowhere
because one obviously must go backward
to keep moving forward, which is key
to all real transit. No wonder some days
I feel like such a Freud, I mean fraud.
Even my oeuvre is all over,
my plosives expanded, my horizons
exploded. No, I did not try to hit
on her. That's all over, as well,
which is just as well. At my age they're
all pretty in pink; but lyrical? Hell.
Capable of devotion? All that perfume,
and lotion can't lather this old leather
anymore. As if they'd show me more
than just the door! Sudoku, loss
of libido, and far worse, I now wish
all the worst people all the best.
Is that not a palimpsest?
The guy next to me is coughing
on me... won't somebody show him
to his coffin, play him some King/Goffin
and send him packing so I don't have to hear
all this old-man hacking? It's like heckling
myself, like going incognito
when I don't even need to. So,
what's all this warfare for? Where's
my cane, Citizen? Don't send me limping
off again to war, I'm too old, and now
the train is finally moving again. It can't go
very far, but I've paid for my ticket,
and I start off on the right foot always.
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