DO NOT PLACE YOUR TRUST IN BABIES

Do not place your trust in babies:

Himmler was one.

Remember he too took his first steps

on funny pudgy legs,

you should have seen him gurgle

and smile at the smiles he saw.

Ah what a happy family.

Next time you bend over a cradle

tuck a hatchet in your thoughts.

[This poem is effective only if the name in line 2 is immediately familiar. If it fails that test, why not replace Himmler with the name of a two-syllable human monster (trochaic or iambic) who is better known to a particular set or generation of readers? Why not “Nero was one”? I am in effect inventing here the genre of the open-slot poem, where the author permits the reader or editor to make a substitution for a given segment of a poem — a name or anything else. Another example: In the last line of the first poem in this volume, “An espresso at the ‘Number Six’”, Vitruvius could be replaced by Palladio, the difference in sound being immaterial. With this in mind, why didn’t I use the names of Hitler or Stalin, which will remain far more familiar to the general public than that of the chief of the Gestapo? Something sinister in the sound of the “mm” led me on; perhaps, too, the wish not to be too obvious.]