Dear Billy Collins

(a poem for my friend, Arik Bjorn, because laughter is the best medicine)

Dear Billy Collins,

Beloved of Poets and

former Poet Laureate of the United States

Deep in the folds of mammalian brain tissue

the adolescent male never leaves

He sleeps in a back hippocampus bedroom or

practices butt and fart jokes in the frontal cortex rec room with his buddies

But if you leave the door ajar, he’ll run out in his underwear

to recite vulgar adolescent routines to your guests

Billy, I tell you this because I just read your poem, ‘Scenes of Hell’

and was following along enjoying your metaphors when you wrote:

“We saw the pilot nose-diving

and the whore impaled on a bedpost,

the pharmacist wandering in a stupor”

Damnit, Billy, you kicked the door ajar and

my adolescent male child runs out with underwear on his head

and begins asking questions polite folks don’t ask in public

Did the whore have help to impale herself on a bedpost?

How big was the bedpost?

Did she use KY jelly or just self-lube?

Will Stormy Daniels be describing its shape in her next book?

I quickly sent him to the back of the house, but it was too late

to salvage the poetry reading in my living room

Everyone was shaken, someone pulled a notebook from her purse

of Marianne Williamson quotes and started mumbling incoherently

about this is why we need Marianne for president

Which set off a political fire that will give some of my liberal friends

another excuse to not vote and I had to perform Heimlich

on closet conservatives in the room because they were choking on laughter

Billy, the reason I wrote you this poem was to tell you

that sometimes a metaphor does not work

and sometimes it works too well

Sincerely, Al Black,

a poet who is in family counseling with his adolescent child

1-12-20