O girlish poets

O girlish poets with boyish hips
and gamine fashions and parted lips
and misty expressions, brave yet wan,
and tousled tresses trembling on
your sleeveless sweaters (or pinned at the nape
and oh-so-symbolically seeking escape),
O daughters of Sexton, Plath, Millay,
peering up from below in that puppydog way
in soft-lens photos adorning the covers
of chapbooks filled with former lovers
(enough to assure us you're able and straight,
but not quite as eager as Edna to mate),
O barefoot match girls, plying your wares,
nymphets vying for Humbert's stares,
poignant, plangent princess-paupers,
doelike heart- and critic-stoppers
(remember the hunter who couldn't bear
to kill Snow White, with her ebony hair?),
O quivering fillies in cyber-space
whose every Web page bears your face,
whose verse is soprano, gauzy, coy,
all of you hollow-cheeked Helens of Troy—
every willowy waif, every langorous lass—
are a pain in my big, fat ass.

© Betty McBitch