Mr. Bad Idea

Oh, Mr. Bad Idea!
Favorite cousin 
in my extended family,
come up and hug my neck
with your icy meat paws,
smear me with one evil kiss
from your greasepaint devil’s face!  

Take me out, get me drunk
and let me slip, in disguise and unnoticed,
to the floor of a convenient dive!
I’ve been such a good sweet piece
of lard for too long; elevate me
by bringing me low then work me till 
I stink like old yogurt,
you bastard, you brother!

Then, Mr. Bad Idea,
what I really want is to adopt
one of your little bad ideas.
I think
I could make it happy, fatten it up,
make it sleek.  I think it’ll work out,
but then again

if metaphor were a firecracker, 
I’d have handled it badly
and likely wound up without
an eye, thumb, or testicle years ago.  
Mr. Bad Idea,
how is it you’re always intact enough
when you are around me
that I forget this and all the rest
of my years of sense?
They call this forgetting  
something else 
in my support group, a name
I can never remember in time
to keep it from happening.

Mr. Bad Idea, you think
we’d be past this.  You’d think
we would be so intimately acquainted
by now that we’d be on more normal terms;
I’d merely entertain you now and then
and hold you at bay the rest of the time.
But you old wolverine!  You badger full
of flammable cotton!  How you do
tear your way in where it’s least wanted — 
in the face of the Queen, in the dark crook
of my left throat.  

I’m telling everyone:
you see me bloated with a Bad Idea,
you better be a friend
and kill that out of me.