I hate to be the one to say this,
Since I am a woman in the body of a man,
And if the poem says this because it can,
Please don’t be offended or sad,
Even with your smothering mother, your absent dad;
I think you can sympathize and understand.
This poem just came to me; it wasn’t planned.
If you listen to this poem’s opinion on sex,
Try not to think about your mother, father, or your ex,
And your husband, is that him in the next room?
Dead to the marriage, writing a poem in a cloud of gloom?
Try not to think about anyone, and let me state
It wasn’t your fault, it was merely fate
That you fell in love with a woman hiding
In a slender, tall, regular-looking guy you had fun deriding
As Woody Allen, intellectual, yes that’s me—
With anxious parents, finding an outlet in theater and poetry.
I never had surgery to get woman and man
To belong to my soul; all I use is metaphor and a certain inner feel,
And with my slender hand, occasionally turn the wheel.
It’s ironic that only the pretty feminine face—
Oh fast moving, pitiful, dying human race!
Looks good in the haircut of a man.
Don’t try to be beautiful; beautiful can only do what it can.
The woman wants only two things from a man,
Kids and a good salary—she’s miserable without these
And also miserable if she doesn’t know she wants these.
And the man is miserable for the same reason, unless he writes
As the most unhappy being
You had the good fortune of reading—or seeing.