NaPoWriMo #18

Back In the Day, You Could Learn a Thing or Two from Your Spread

Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.
Or, so they say. Maybe that’s the problem.

My children have run amok
from birth to now without their bonnets.
Hatless. Exposed. Bare and naked,
little boy head and girl head uncovered

in rain, in snow, day and night
without their bonnets. Stranded
like hapless cartoon animals
in a leaky raft, cursed to live out their
days never quite reaching the island
where the pirates have hidden the gold.

There’s another problem. Cartoons.
Not the traditional violence,
but the nouveau brutality. In the old days
the mouse beat the cat,
and that was that.
Today, the mouse in slicked back hair,
Sean John couture would have a witty
retort for the slung back cat in phat
nylon and gold chains. This is how it is,
or as they say today, it is
what it is. Is it, now? Is it.

And what if, I, a poet, just repeated
these lines? It is. What it is.
It is.
It is.
It is.
We still wouldn’t be caught dead
wearing bonnets,
blue, indigo, or down
in the dumps.
And whose fault is that?