“Flew It All Around” by Matthew Lippman

My kid did my hair this morning.

She got her fingers in my mop

and fucked it up.

Made all these spikes and railroads trestles.

Threw in some twirls and blue paint.

I had spent an hour with the brush. Didn’t matter.

She came upstairs and got her hands in there,

did some modern dance acrobatics on it.

When she was done

it was a garbage dump,

a forest of brutalized pines.

She said, Your head’s a forest.

She was right. She’s nine.

I wanted to say,

This is a metaphor for the world, the house,

the whole neighborhood,

but she already knows.

Everything she knows, she knows.

Honestly, I thought I was a cool dad

for being cool

with the cool kid

messing up daddio’s hair.

This was just me feeling good about myself, hot stuff cool.

Honestly, I wish a morning like this for everyone, for everything—

the parking lots and the playgrounds,

the school yards and classrooms,

the boardrooms,

the forests and the streams.

That we all can wake up and have someone come upstairs to fuck up our hair

for fun.

All that good stuff right before breakfast,

right before we step outside into the sunshine

and it smashes our face to pieces.