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Three by Craig Chaffin
Stardom
It is not just the toddler
stumbling in red pumps
or the teen with the dangling
bull ring through his nose
that want attention; most women
would give their right breast
and men their right nut
for fame.
If you believe angels watch over
you in a pink robe and curlers,
hair stinking of cigarettes,
then tell us.
We might gather heart
from your confidential trust in stardom
before the unseen spirits
as TV gets harder and harder to bear
without our faces on it.
Famous
My daughter watches
too much television.
She wants to be "famous."
When I ask her, 'For what?'
she says, 'just famous.'
How can I warn her
how a painted smile
sets the teeth on edge?
The hotter the medium,
the flatter the image,
the toneless conformity of cathodes.
Televangelists have cockatoo hair
and extend their vowels.
Basketball coaches wear ties
no matter how they sweat.
They are "famous."
I want her anonymous,
hidden from publicity
like Jesus from Herod,
one in a flock of a million
monarch butterflies
perched on the white sycamores
of Malibu Canyon.
The Golden Age
Two poets made a living
in the seventeenth century:
Ben Jonson and John Dryden.
The rest were courtiers
or divines, whose income
was not ink-dependent.
People more admired Milton
than read him, and Burton's
Anatomy of Melancholy
outsold Shakespeare three to one,
proving self-help books
more popular than poetry.
C.E. Chaffin writes, "I've published a lot, more on-line than on paper, in everything from The Alaska Quarterly Review to Zuzu's Petals. Mellen Press released my first volume of poems in 1997, entitled Elementary, available through Amazon.com. A second-generation native Californian and family physician, I live near LA in a high rise on the ocean with my wife and three daughters. I am co-editor of the Melic Review and belong to the Zeugma on-line workshop.
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