the sag saga

“I’ve got everything I had twenty-five years ago. It’s just lower.” Gypsy Rose Lee

in the culture in which i was raised/perkiness of breasts was a plus/sagginess a minus/and “man-boobs” is now in the vocabulary/along with the contractive form “moobs”

here I sit on the edge of my unshared bed/unperky/sagging/able to tuck pencils under my moobs/and have them stay snugly in place

but my flesh meltdown is not that bad yet/in that if I stood up and straightened my spine/the pencils would fall to the floor

but i saw the future in july 1984/when my 76-year-old grandfather was given a birthday shirt/and took off his to put it on

with his imperious pharaoh goatee/and majestic gravity-pulled bulk/he looked like the god of california mudslides

i do feel irrational shame/because of the sag-stigma imposed by my upbringing/and i imagine women feel worse/though shame at such a natural evolvement/is just plain silly

let us all laugh at the universe/and its outrageous second law of thermodynamics/and face, nay, REJOICE, in the phenomenon of sagging

as an artist i will think of my sag-in-progress/as my solo slow-moving-sculpture show

for i now accept and embrace the fact/that the way of all flesh/is downward