Mise en garde

Danger the bird will by-pass her cot
Danger of seeming nonchalant
Danger in knowing the spill of consumption
Danger in blood and its familiar trenches
Danger in anger and dangle and gerund,
gender and candy
and absent grandparents
Danger we'll forget to tower the princess
Danger in hair that grows its assistance
Danger we'll parent with cultish fervor
Danger in Sears or Spock or Ferber
Danger in despots and kindly old ladies
Dangers that thrive in arid climates
Danger our daughter will never learn bus routes
Danger of the curb and the cars and the costumes
Danger her speech foreign to our own
Danger we'll mirror each other in tone
Danger of insistence spelled kin and existence
Danger my mother will shred the board's minutes
(No one will know I was once one of them)
Danger of lobes puritan and savage
Danger we'll become like all the others
Danger the beautiful names of poisons:
Aromatics, aromatics, all around us
Danger she'll be crushed by our identity theories
Danger it keeps us from watching a movie
Dangers at borders, in bars, and on boats
Danger in Idol & Survivor & Lost
Danger she'll beg us for the newest iPhone
("But, mama, it's so boring on the moon!")
Danger in the endless Internet search:
Hot dogs=carcinogens=slow painful death.