Nominal head of the Sunshine Family,
though it was your wife who did all the spinning.
I don’t remember what job you had, in the
hippie-dippy craft cottage you were supposed to live in.
I think my parents considered the cottage to be
a bridge too far. I was lucky to get the dolls of you,
your wife, your baby. You wore hiking boots, I recall,

jeans, a red turtleneck, and your eyes were
glittery, uncanny— little spooky gems in deep sockets.
This was probably Christmas of 1978, and in Seattle,
no one could help absorbing at least some of this
style, or way of being: My mother and I shopped
at a co-op, sometimes had lunch at a granola-type café
where I got frozen yogurt (a real novelty then).

It may have been called Something Sunshine
or Sunshine Something, too, and I am duty-bound
as a native (when you come right down to it)
to say that this is not the mismatch that it might seem,
for Seattle. I do recall the clear, bright summers.
The hydrofoil boat races on our lake. Anyway,

Mr. Sunshine, you moved with us several times,
making the cut somehow, again and again,
though I can’t imagine you’re anywhere now,
other than  a landfill in Columbus. Your baby,
I might still have somewhere. I have no idea

what ever became of your wife. As for you,
the last time I saw, you were in a plastic bin
in my father’s last basement, next to Donny Osmond,
also naked, without his female companion,

still smiling, still holding, if not his microphone,
then at least the stigmata (singular stigmato?)
from when he still had something to say. Or sing.

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Today’s Poem a Day Chapbook Challenge prompt was “Mr. _______.”