Bachelors And Howling Dogs Poem by Robert Rorabeck

These are the painful errors reflected from my face,
As if I had been in a knife fight instead
Of going to prom, and bled in the swimming pool
Where my luxurious sisters had planned to swim,
And I am left injured in a mirror where my friends
Have been cutting coke,
But feel so bad about it, they make me promise to
Keep it a secret, but I am so far out here,
Down past the bustling rapids of cars, where the
Waters begin to pool into the everglades,
Where they burn sugarcane
In the celibate shadows where the caged lions pace,
Where not even games of baseball intrude,
That there is not a soul to tell, swimming in the higher
Clefts of palm trees, skipping like flat stones of sunlight
Along the underbelly of aeroplanes;
Thus, I thought my disease could be an aphrodisiac,
Like a trilling call, which would thus enunciate myself to her,
The way a grandmother may sometimes fall in love with
A young musician,
But she is too busy pouring the liquors of preoccupations,
To listen to a drunken demiurge, the first desire of a greasy
Teenager to become a god of the fallow classrooms,
To write love letters on the chalkboard as if a universal answer
To the indescribable equations,
But she has a real artist cutting her hair and
Walking her dogs, buying her ice-cream dripping in sweaty
Cherries down at the parlor- a groupie of the pretty boys
And their polygamy, thus I remain the scarred and chased,
Dreaming of the weedy paths first brushed by Conquistadors,
And the house I might have one day in the humid island of
Bachelors and their howling dogs.