Phil Spector’s Wig

I saw it on the street tonight
glowing like a Ronette’s dress.

It smelled of gunpowder and genius,
even from a distance of some yards.

A domestic rabbit picked it up
and carried it back to its hutch

to nurse it to adulthood, mistaking it
for a baby.  When the rabbit’s back was turned

the wig rolled itself into a tube and slipped away
through the mesh, humming madly to itself.

Where’s my head,
it kept singing,

a lying tune as large as that myth from the 1960s
that everything was poised on the brink of utopia

until Sirhan and Ray and Oswald
and those guys in the Audubon Ballroom had to bring guns

into the picture.  Where’s my head, where’s my gun,
where is my warm gray cloud of sound? Phil’s wig

packed heat undercover long before all that happened
and now we know that there was always a touch of the bad crazy

looming behind the innocent songs.  Be my baby, dammit.
Be my baby, be my baby.

I watched the wig
scuttle away.

I’m no longer some wascally wabbit,
it sang,

at last I’m the streetwalking cheetah
I always knew I could be,

and I like it.