Dec. 4, 2011

What would you do

If a man loved you

A man closer to your father’s age

Than yours

And closer

To the salaries of those

You abhor

Than the one you meagerly claimed on your IRS form

Alongside the donations you gave

To the church

And the Environmental Defense Fund

And Planned Parenthood

He gives thousands

Because he makes millions

To other non-profits

And people notice when he walks in a room

Because he’s Hispanic

(A different color)

So they try and denigrate him to inferior

(Incensed he rose to their level)

Or they acquiesce to him because he makes money

Gives money away

But only if it’s worth his while

If it aligns with his greater profit margin

And what would you do

If you were worth his while

If you were his profit

And his margin

This man your father’s age

This millionaire

What if he loved you

And invested all his age and wisdom,

Time and resources,

Money and power into you

What would you do

You with your 1100 square foot house

And your multiple-jobs-reported-IRS form

You who always longed to be loved

(Squeezed into the more traditional storyline)

By a boy your own age

With whom you’ll grow old

And struggle with finances

And rebellious children

Whose dreams you’ll share

Because you’re both idealists

And you both recycle

And sometimes you go camping

Completely naked

But this older man has already done

All those things

With someone else

In a time passed long ago

When you were learning arithmetic

Which in your time they called math

And spelling and

Music

And the songs you sang

The rhymes you recited

Reflected the culture you knew

Muffet and her tuffet

And the Little Old Lady

And that kid who put his thumb in the pie

And the Challenger made you cry

And Kurt Cobain’s death

And the first Gulf War

Not Kennedy’s assassination

Or MLK

Or Vietnam

Those were before your time and are called history

History he lived

Because he’s older than you

And there are two generations of lovers

Between you two

But he longs to bridge the gap

As they say

He’s bridged a lot of gaps

The rags to riches

The Spanish to English

The unknown to the acclaimed

But now, he longs not for fame or more fortune

Only to settle his heart

To do what’s right

To satisfy his soul

And he writes poetry about the stars

And touching you

And salsa dancing

(Because he’s Hispanic)

But your grandparents taught you

The waltz, the polka,

Swing

Can you swing

So far back

That you can bridge

The gap

The generations

The twenty years

The thousands of days

The millions of minutes

The millions of dollars

The collars of clothes

The colors of the collars

That represent your income,

Your heritage,

Whether or not those collars or colors mean anything now

What would you do

If a rich, Hispanic man your father’s age

Fell in love with you

A white girl in her early thirties

An actor

Who once played

Nelly Forbush

In that Rogers & Hammerstein piece

About war and racism

So you get it, you know

(Or at least you pretended to know

To understand love

When you were twenty and onstage)

You, the artist

Who only sometimes wears a bra

But longs to love

With every fiber of your being

Really you do

But you never imagined

Being wrapped up

In this

Without a curtain to close at the end

Or a bow to tie

To seal the deal, to end the show

This isn’t what you expected

The accolade you wanted

The hands clapping weren’t supposed to be brown

And aged

And stained by money

(No matter how well-intentioned)

And they certainly aren’t supposed

To be joined with yours at the alter

By another hand,

Belonging to your father

Whom you will never tell

About this older, Hispanic man,

Wealthy,

Who longs to hold you

(The right girl at the wrong time)

You won’t tell him

Because if you don’t know what you would do

What would he

Do with a man his contemporary

Brown and rich

Who loves his daughter

White

And poor

And lonely

And ill-suited for a man like that?