Dirty Old Man Talks to His Neighbors
Contemplating retirement,
D.O.M. asks his neighbors,
all retired, how they spend
their time. I garden, says one.
D.O.M. thinks: Gardening
is not a manly occupation.
I make furniture, says another.
D.O.M. thinks: I’ve never made
anything in my life, nor ever will.
He asks a third, who replies:
I twist in the wind, when there is one.
And what if there is no wind, neighbor?
I twist and make my own.
Finally, D.O.M. thinks,
a man after my own heart.
Dirty Old Man Looks for Same
When he was growing up, men like him
were everywhere. His father was a D.O.M.,
as were his uncles and great uncles.
But that was another time and another place.
Here and now, D.O.M. are as rare as white deer.
If there were a club of D.O.M., he thinks,
as there are book and garden and country clubs,
his life would be improved. Call it DOMUS.
In between trips to the bathroom,
he and his clubmates would smoke cigars,
sip scotch, trade stories, fictional and maybe not.
Every once in a while,
even he would have something to tell,
like the time the blonde dermatologist
wrote her phone number on the back
of the prescription for rosacea.
(But she must have retired by now,
and off somewhere painting pelicans.)
After years of trying within and without
his family to recruit for the club,
D.O.M. has concluded that Dirty Old Men,
like white deer, are born and not made.
A postscript from Wikipedia: “If you ever
see a white deer, you are one of the lucky few.”
Dirty Old Man Argues with His Wife
For fifteen years he and his wife have been arguing
about a song. She says it’s a song about young love
gone wrong. He says it’s a bitter, hit-bottom lament
by a middle-aged man (like he used to be)
whose much younger paramour has jilted him.
She says that only a young girl (like she used to be)
could say, credibly, that she forgot to eat and sleep
and pray because of how much she was in love.
He says the speaker is exaggerating, as when he compares
himself to a child of three. She says the only reason
for the number is the rhyme. He replies that it doesn’t make
sense for Sinatra to sound like a love-sick teenager
when he was trying to get over Ava. She comes back
with an irrefutable ripost: He sang “My Way,” didn’t he?
And so they go on, happily eristic, a song of innocence
or of experience, depending on who doesn’t want to argue.
Illustration by César Beltrán
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