Because I Have Yet Anything Else Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I forget to feed my deserving adverbs:
I go through the drive-thru for breakfast,
And the Chicana who serves me, like a tiny
Bell-shaped flower, has indigo an inch deep
Into her wrist; a perfunctory epitaph that
At night is perfumed and more or less naked.
I look like an old man to her: thirty-years old,
And gray, and proud of it, because I have a
Publication in my backroom I cannot take her
To, and now the world is filled with sharpened
Ironies: And inside, it is easier to smile;
But I would rather be a poet; and I have dreams
Of resurrecting yellow dogs, in procedures
Which cost five grand, and when I wake up the
Yellow dog is staring at me and whining, as if she
Could smell that I had dreamt of her.
She licks my face in her fidelity, as I remain
A part of the unspoken fraternity who continues
To dream every other night of those fine girls from high-school;
And we should dream of them until we are old men,
Liquored into a room so quiet it roars like Niagara
Falls, the yellow dog underneath the table with the
Daisy patterned table-cloth, her moist black snout
Twitching intelligently, like nerves on the temples of
A genius. I did not share the poem I wrote before
This poem, because its lies were easily found out,
But I will put this one down as a public notice,
Like a wanted ad in the fading classifies, like a lost
Child’s photograph stabled to a telephone pole,
Because what is has spoken of are the finite truths
Which deserve to appear for awhile in the empirical happenstance,
And because I have yet anything else to say.