"Daddy" Warbucks

In Memoriam

What's missing is the eyeballs

in each of us, but it doesn't matter

because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.

You let me touch them, fondle the green faces

lick at their numbers and it lets you be

my "Daddy!" "Daddy!" and though I fought all alone

with molesters and crooks, I knew your money

would save me, your courage, your "I've had

considerable experience as a soldier…

fighting to win millions for myself, it's true.

But I did win," and me praying for "our men out there"

just made it okay to be an orphan whose blood was no one's,

whose curls were hung up on a wire machine and electrified,

while you built and unbuilt intrigues called nations,

and did in the bad ones, always, always,

and always came at my perils, the black Christs of childhood,

always came when my heart stood naked in the street

and they threw apples at it or twelve-day-old-dead-fish.

"Daddy!" "Daddy," we all won that war,

when you sang me the money songs

Annie, Annie you sang

and I knew you drove a pure gold car

and put diamonds in you coke

for the crunchy sound, the adorable sound

and the moon too was in your portfolio,

as well as the ocean with its sleepy dead.

And I was always brave, wasn't I?

I never bled?

I never saw a man expose himself.

No. No.

I never saw a drunkard in his blubber.

I never let lightning go in one car and out the other.

And all the men out there were never to come.

Never, like a deluge, to swim over my breasts

and lay their lamps in my insides.

No. No.

Just me and my "Daddy"

and his tempestuous bucks

rolling in them like corn flakes

and only the bad ones died.

But I died yesterday,

"Daddy," I died,

swallowing the Nazi-Jap animal

and it won't get out

it keeps knocking at my eyes,

my big orphan eyes,

kicking! Until eyeballs pop out

and even my dog puts up his four feet

and lets go

of his military secret

with his big red tongue

flying up and down

like yours should have

as we board our velvet train.