Milk-Fed

July 5 2013

The soft pink faces
and coiffed white hair
of comfortable men
who are gracefully aging
look much the same.
Puffy-eyed, and jowly
laugh-lined, and proudly
2 days unshaved,
the snow-white bristle
that looks manly, but states
I am slightly risqué,
no longer a slave
to the 9-to-5.

They look well-fed,
prosperous skin
that nicely resists
the wrinkles and hints
of hard-living men
who are wearing their years
far less gently,
toothlessly grinning
as tenuous pensions thin.

There's the retired exec
who grew used to power and wealth,

expects

to live long, and well.

And the sleek politician
still missing pressing the flesh,
an old Irishman
irrepressibly spinning his tales.

The milk-fed faces
of self-made men
are pink and white and smug.
Who sincerely believe
we deserve what we get;
the poor
can only blame
themselves.

I saw a recent picture of a grinning Brian Mulroney (a former Prime Minister, for any non-Canadian readers.) And also of another former politician of a certain age (and, rarely, a well-respected one) Bob Rae. I was reminded how some age well and some don't, but how pretty much men all start to converge in late middle age: the puffy pink face, and sagging features; the startling whiteness of hair (when there is some, that is!); the calculated 2-day bristle, that seems to say relaxed, but not yet given up. (I've always had a fat pink face and been negligent with shaving; so I guess I'm off the hook!)

It's so easy to see the prosperity and money in these aging faces: you can't help but think of the stereotype of the powerful old white men who run the world. But as an ageing white men who feels relatively powerless, and who never ran anything -- much less the world -- I more than most know how ridiculous is this cliché of a complacent patriarchy, in charge.

Life is a genetic lottery; and after that, determined by contingency and luck, as much as wisdom and skill. When you're lucky enough to have easy money, you get to age milk-fed and pink and puffy. But what you don't get to do is feel smug and self-satisfied; justly rewarded, and entitled.

(Which is to say that our system of crony-capitalism is rigged by and for the winners, in which the rich get richer, and most of the rest don't. But that's a whole other poem. Or maybe too political and ideological for poetry at all, since I don't think poetry is the form best suited to advocacy or agit-prop. Actually, this poem probably came out way too political for my taste, as it is. But I suppose once in awhile a little harder edge is satisfying; if not for the reader, then at least for the self-indulgent writer, getting it down.)

"Self-made men" is, of course, used ironically. "Milk-fed" is even better: I think of milk-fed cattle, lined-up for slaughter, as a metaphor for conventional and complacent; and of babies, who are also pudgy and pink. You can see the hard-living in the faces of old men. And in the others, the soft pudge; almost as if in their dotage, you can see them slowly regress into infancy, swallowed up by baby fat!