Oh this is another poem that comes from Advice
To The Confused.
I heard a lady interviewed on the radio,
she had made up a book of sayings
that mothers told their daughters what
to do when you go out on dates.
Of course, this was all new to me,
because I never had any sisters in my family.
And she mentioned Mad Money.
Do people still know what Mad Money is?
Yeah.
OK, have some in your shoe tonight there?
And also some wonderfully delicious phrases that
of course, I couldn't let slip by,
one was that nothing good can happen after midnight,
don't we all know that?
At one word you may not know in the poem is a Kepi
that's K-E-P-I, that is or at least was a type of military
hat that French soldiers wore with sloping crown the little
rim on it.
It's called of course, Famous Musicians.
Because mothers tell their daughters
that nothing good can happen after midnight
and to their sorrow some believe it,
and go on to become grim but famous musicians, or worse
avid editors of entomological magazines,
while the others whom I never seem to meet sneaking in late
keep that as a secret and licking their lips
pretend to be obedient.
I have gone off and joined the Foreign Legion,
There laying siege to native cities.
I'm as bloodthirsty as the rest scaling the ramparts,
but that's also a pretense.
In times of peace, raising two fingers to my kepi,
really I'm a saluting a demagogue,
the only thing alive on this blazing moonscape,
a priest in disguise having given up on art because it's
too easy and looking for some storm
wrecked soul just like me, but weaker to convert.
Finally, we find each other.
And because it's dangerous we take weeks
before getting around to exchanging
religious experiences.
Only then do we discover something,
he's really a woman dressed up like a man.
For the rest of our enlistments that's our Mad Money.
Later we have a baby, born with a tattoo dated 1917 and long
sensitive pianist's fingers.
I'm really not that strange.