I went to an all-you-can-eat buffet in Utah today. It made me so sad to see (mostly women), 2 or 3 times as big as they should be, carrying 2, 3, 4 or 5 FULL plates of food back to their tables, stuffing themselves. It almost made me cry. And I’m not a skinny guy … but I was probably the 2nd smallest guy in the place! It’s amazing that a culture that places so much emphasis on avoiding “sins of the flesh” (drugs, booze, coffee, sex outside of marriage, smoking) can turn a blind eye to gluttony.

What should you do if:/
You can’t drink, smoke, do drugs, sex?/
Eat yourself to death.

Fifty years later,/
Mom’s still buying furniture./
I’m still bored, waiting.

Ewe cud bee
sew ez
2 flirt wit.
Ewe air mist.

I’ve had a number of friends and associates who’ve been impacted by breast cancer. One recent acquaintance blogged about the worry she feels about telling a man — who is finally worthy to know this information — about her radical mastectomy and her breast implants. This poem, originally titled: “He may not know how to communicate what he’s thinking in the appropriate words, but he knows the feeling he’s feeling,” reflects both sides of that dilemma.

She wonders,
as she looks under
her shirt,
how she’ll broach
the subject, fear and hurt
of having breasts poached,
when she stops the flirt,
and reveals,
sans boast,
what has been concealed.

What will her future man say?
Will he vanish away?
Thoughs like those
run rampant, and hold sway
through her mind today.

But suppose
the man already knows,
and doesn’t care
what the surgeon’s knife laid bare?
What if he just wants to have exposed
the heart that’s left under there?

I’ll be the one there/
with the bouffant Kramer hair/
and Eastside polo.

Written for a friend, to her husband who was away on a business trip:

Dark man, center of my universe:
We look at the stars the same,
the moon the same.

Tomorrow you and I will be together;
though apart, you carry my heart.

It is, again, so/
tempting to flirt, late, with you./
Wonder what you’ll do?