“Dead people don’t like black olives,”
I told my partners in eighth grade
dancing class, who never listened
as we foxtrotted, one-two, one-two.

The dead people I often consulted
nodded their skulls in unison
while I flung my black velvet cape
over my shoulders and glowered
from deep-set, burning eyes,
walking the city streets, alone at fifteen
crazy for cheerleaders and poems.

At Hamden High football games, girls
in short pleated skirts
pranced and kicked, and I longed
for their memorable thighs.
They were friendly—poets were mascots—
but never listened when I told them
that dead people didn’t like black olives.

Instead the poet, wearing his cape,
continued to prowl in solitude
intoning inscrutable stanzas
while halfbacks and tackles
made out. Friday nights after football,
on sofas in knotty-pine rec rooms
with magnanimous cheerleaders.

Decades later, after the dead
have stopped their blathering
about olives, obese halfbacks wheeze
upstairs to sleep beside cheerleaders
waiting for hip replacements,
while a lascivious, doddering poet,
his burning eyes deep-set
in wrinkles, cavorts with their daughters.