Robert Rorabeck - Going Back To School

Strangeness of unaccounted numbers slithers
Through the unmowed grass,
Through another day of monsooning summer
Under the mobile of a smiling moon,

Thus the night pants with the rasping breathing
Of plagiarists and the dimming gentlemen in their
Unofficial meetings the next field over,

While the girls in the petticoats in love serve
Their bodies’ inebriate liquors to the unscarred
And untried men,

Where the trains are busy with their bodies’ long coils,
And the highways of unpaid and starving truckers,
Alongside which the state workers sleep safely for now
Married to lawyers, diamond wedding rings glistening
Like cut poisons on their dreaming fingers:

Thus, I write it down sucking the paper cut digits,
Alongside the infinite shore where the horseshoe crabs scuttle,
Where the fateful anchovies shimmer in orgasms of silver and
Breathless death,

I say, this should be Spain, and the trees olive,
And the clouds the curtains behind which she is naked,
But none of it is true though none the less moving forward unabashedly
With the recklessness of some liquor,

And the banners the way her hair flowed out his window
After the last period of rote lessons and full-toothed dentists,
And the side of her face the profile of a freshly painted billboard
I stream by attentively in observation of what there is for sale.

Robert Rorabeck

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