Fearing Charlie Chaplin

I am having a time of it,
managing my modern problem.

My daughter loves you, Charlie Chaplin,
and it makes me tremble, tremble.

She sits cross-legged on our couch, perched forward in smile,
fighting off bedtime deadline to watch five more minutes, five more minutes
of your Vaudeville falldown.

And she loves you and your falldown and your little moustache, too.
She’s too young to see a little Hitler in you,
too young to fear the tyranny of a little dictator who will juggle-drop her heart.

What dynamo cogs will you wind her up in?
Would she pilfer day-old bread loafs for you, play house in a rickety dockside shack?
Would she sleep soundly in vacant department store beds
while you disable and enable your friends, the crooks?
Will you make her giggle with forks and rolls as kicking, dancing legs and feet,
one of your gold rush girls adoring the table ballet?
I see you googly-walking down city streets, dragging her to carnival cafes,
shoulder-pressed dances of whoop-it-up, and black and white sunsets.
I see you slipping, sliding and sending her down the God-tragic conveyor belt assembly line.
I see her slyly working the coppers to bust you out of handcuffs, out of paddywagons,
out of black metal prison bars and little light-filled jail windows.
I see her sneaking out in bowler hats, loose suits, and a unbelievably bendy cane.

My daughter loves me, Charlie Chaplin.
I am serious, stoic, solid in body, in mind.
I embrace responsibility, Charlie Chaplin.
I haven’t strapped on roller skates and teetered on precipices in years.

But my daughter loves you, Charlie Chaplin,
and it makes me tremble, tremble.

I am having a time of it,
managing my modern problem.