--- A N I S   S H I V A N I

I’ve been running the bathtub for you at 75 degrees
	Since you first pensive penis sprout at ten.
		So Will, swim like a toad in your porous latte.

I will not be a traitor to my fucking country!
	The shout goes up over the din of other balding men 
		Singing in similar showers built like prison pens. 

Mother, what has made the roosted pigeons of our time
	Turn into wandering pigs? Trite grunts fill the halls 
		Of higher schooling, and math and crap

Of an indistinguishable kind, rubbery blue, make me cheat 
	At chess with my best friends from Yale. I tell them
		Their decision to go into foreign service or snooping

Looks good in retrospect. At night, I turn my brownbacked study
	Upside down, in search of that poem from Auden called	
		“September, 1939,” that he seems not to have penned.

My mother approved each of my girlfriends, from poor Bella 
	To rich Jean. Each of them denied strains of domesticity.
		Every man is an idiot Ed Sullivan in a tidy suit.