The Biscuit Joint: Poems

I ♥ Hot Moms

19 I ♥ HOT MOMS The guy with the “I ♥ Hot Moms” t-shirt makes his way down the airplane aisle, and I think, who doesn’t? Hot moms even ♥ themselves, or we wouldn’t see so many of them in groups of five or six at your finer restaurants, laughing and getting drunk while, back home, their kids text and bully each other and wait for their hot moms to return and help them with their assignments, and their morose husbands stare into their computer screens at stock prices or sports scores or hot-mom porn sites. Therefore what profiteth it a young man to declare his affection for these inestimable women, these fleshy beauties whose maiden years are behind them yet whose lives as crones are ahead of them by a multiple of, say, two. Why, it’s as though you’re saying you like babies or kittycats or that, given the choice, you’d rather eat ice cream than hog vomit mixed with mud. How slender the line between our thoughts, so virginal, so uncomplicated, and the world into which those thoughts step, so ungainly now, so cumbrous and bunglesome. At the symphony once, I strolled about during the interval and returned to find a young gentleman in the row behind ours with his elbows on the back of my seat, and he was saying something to Barbara that I couldn’t hear, and she said something to him, and the people around them roared with laughter. “What was that about?” I say, and Barbara tells me the young fellow asked her if she’d like to go out sometime, and she says, No, thank you, I’m married, and he says, Too bad—I like older women, and she says, You need to work on your lines, and that’s what sets off our neighbors, all of whom are a lot closer to our ages than his. Young men, young men! You must be like Jude in the Hardy novel, who, on first discovering his intellectual powers, “ran about and smiled outwardly at his inward thoughts, as if they were people meeting and nodding to him— 20 smiled with that singularly beautiful irradiation which is seen to spread on young faces at the inception of some glorious idea, as if a supernatural lamp were held inside their transparent natures, giving rise to the flattering fancy that heaven lies about them.” Let the hot moms of your imagination descend as from paradise to flirt with and caress you; let them lift their shirts over their heads and toy with your belt buckle and in that way light you from within, guiding you to better choices in, say, casual wear—a tailored shirt open at the throat, cuffs turned back twice—or in the type of remark that doesn’t end conversations but begins them, like “I’m glad they’re playing work by contemporary composers, aren’t you?” and “How did Beethoven do it? He couldn’t hear a thing!” This page intentionally left blank ...