Beautiful Playgrounds Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Beautiful playgrounds, aren't your memories
Here in the ambushed bushes,
And the latchkeyed children are yet beside the
Road—I cannot remember the rhymes
I've used to give to them,
And Arthur Rimbaud has been gone all week—
I still keep him smoking on my wall of
My windowless compassions—
As I still pretend to be a talentless freak—
And I am here, dying—
My firstborn son will come this April,
And Shakespeare is immortal:
He has won the lottery, and I keep complaining
To all the prettiest princesses in Disney World
Who are too cold and unreal to listen—
The world is melting,
Soon it will be an ocean within a week—
The portables where they teach the windowless
Children bend and creek—
Maybe my wife really loves me,
Maybe there are diamonds in the bed of the
Crick—
But I know the busses will turn, and turn around
Tomorrow, and the love of my blinded muse
Has been gone all week.