More Poetry

& the history of tanning
i tell her goes back
to Hollywood
in the 1940s
maybe it
was Dorothy
Lamour in the Road
pictures with Hope & Crosby
maybe it was competition with
the exotic girls of the Pacific who
serviced the soldiers sailors & Marines
but something clicked in the psyche
of American women & men
(Errol Flynn divine cad)
& what had been
considered
the skin
color
of the poor
became that of
the sophisticated
the worldly wise &
leisure set who had time
to loll about poolside & soak
up the sun & make the whoopee
instead of hay which what
the tan were usually
about: farmers
they were
the poor
it was the rich
who had milky skin
who did not have to labor
in the sun: darkies
were slave
stock be
they
African
Asian (India)
Native American
white meant top dog
but that changed & now
white is associated with factory
ghosts assembly line Morlocks the dead
wage slaves who work under false fluorescent suns
& the only recourse for those afflicted with milky white skin
& the inability to tan is to harken back to an ancestry of royalty
cite primogeniture as the culprit & i tell her how a distant grandfather
landed in Jamestown in 1619 (prior to the Mayflower) with Negroes & women
a pimp or a slaver maybe but certainly of royal blood & maybe we can get her tan in a can

© 2010 Richard Lance Williams February 5 tan in a can

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