Chrissy gonna be a trophy wife
she’s gotta know not to talk
her butt’s gotta be small enough.
she gotta be good at lying.
eat up, supermodel
the urge to color coordinate
drinking the worms in tequila
this is what shrinks call nurturing.

there ain’t nothing finer than a woman
in a tight black dress - so she
pulls out the skimpy wardrobe.
the guys is always asking you for
your sixteen year old daughter.

she’s hanging around Deep
(a good place to raise kids,
sell ‘em to bars)

call in, come over
kid got in a fight
(you don’t say)
one of the little ones is crying in the bedroom and
your sixteen year old daughter tells you
she’s just coming down from
a meth bender
the classiest whisky
half-pound of horse tranquilizers.

crack whore with
police busting nobody:
you still caught hell.
dump her before she rats you out
she might get pissed and tell the cops
call 911
a violation but
“what makes you and your old man fight,”
they say.

gotta go to the doctor,
lab-coat guys from Johns Hopkins
authentic pointy-heads with lab coats who say
(she’s crazy)
she is
hostage situations in yuppie neighborhoods.

you put your arm around her
all comforting like
tell her she’s gotta move out. she’s an adult. now
all the knife fights will be where
they ain’t your problem.

good thing about Chad is he don’t smell like roofing tar.
chances are he’s a pervert.
pay off your delinquent child
and kids could take him to show and tell.

she says, “my girlfriends say
I got to set boundaries. what the hell
does that mean?”

it’s just valentine’s day carnations
$9.99 a dozen on sale
but he says he’s horny,
and there ain’t no other decent men around.
goes to lay with him, says she’ll be right back and
she never put out
(until he wrestled it away by punching her
in the throat.) she just
bends down so no one sees:
part of the job requirements.

she went to Yale, majored in English.
why be stupid about it? she figures. he’s picking up
the tab (three hundred grand)
she gotta be good at lying
she gotta know how to talk.
she knows how to say
its lines speak to a piercing violation of the human psyche

but
no one could feel superior, which means it wasn’t very good art.
she quit the joint and she still ain’t there.
she’s hanging around Deep.