Is it gauche to wear your own blog’s hat
to the trampoline park? Not necessarily,
though other parents look away and warily
grasp the fleeing hand of their own brat,
head for the door and text their husbands that
DC is done. They moved to town primarily
for work; she never thought they’d more than temporarily
live like this, astew in techno- or gerontocrat,
schools too expensive, all their neighbors weird
and weirdly wired all the time—they think
in numbered paragraphs; a legal brief
is better than a poem; they believe a beard
an edgy look, and though they love to drink
their boringness will beggar your belief.

If not to the manor born, at least to come
screeching up its drive at middle-age:
considered by your compeers as a kind of sage
for putting into writing something dumb
that the unworthy rich would think a rule of thumb;
one thinks, that though one doesn’t earn a wage
but squawks instead for money from the lecture stage,
invests it with his friends, and takes the proceeds from
an arbitrage of rates and fluctuations
that he is nonetheless not of the sort
who could or ought to call himself a mas-
ter of the universe, ennobled, blessed by nations
and kings: he’d sell himself a little short:
He is, in fact, the upper middle class.