Baking Your Cakes Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Baking your cakes,
Your crocks of clay in Colorado:
Can’t I come?
It was where my mother was born.
In golden.
In aspen- She looks like Colorado,
Her hair silver, not gray:
A black woman came in and talked her up
For hours,
Because this black woman thought or hoped
Or figured that she
Looked like my mother,
Or wanted to look like her according to all the
Daytime talk shows and game shows
And soap operas
She spent her life on:
And I don’t blame her. My mother is
A very beautiful person;
And she is very simple, and loyal:
But it is you who I am thinking of,
With your raven hair
And mascara and your daylong job:
Better suited for the evil though beautiful witch,
You still have more friends than I’ve
Ever had,
But I find it hard to believe that you even care
How many friends you have,
Or how beautiful if
Venal you are,
Though if there was a single black woman in the
Town you live in,
High up in that stony cleavage who’d been
Fed off the very same licorice stuff,
I’m sure she would talk on and on with you
For hours just the same.