Books By Dante Alighieri (Censored) Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Somnambulists cutting hair with sexual charm
Walked into the student barber shop on 13th St.,
Across the blackface cops raise taxes in the ghetto,
Say I look like a writer: I, look like a writer, shooting range
So Huck Finn drifts down the river, Jim
Stop me before I piss in the street.
One night I got all drunk over you,
I got all drunk over you and went back to her-
There is a yellow studio apartment in the 2nd story:
I don’t live there anymore; She is married
Under the oaks with one headlight out,
Because I didn’t resist their badge’s lavender authority-
But I only do cursive with my d-k out on the handlebar,
And then its all in Old English allegory:
Because the opal virgins are on their way,
The Green Knight’s mistress gives me a girdle
To save my neck, accepting I lose the challenge:
I’m no good at French, though
I wouldn’t turn down a rimbaudian kiss.
Doing liberal arts, the red queen is naked bare breast
And solving coital arithmetic with an associate professor,
Also not her husband, though a suave card player-
At the top floor of the library, there is a living dictionary
Then the University is the abandoned prairie- 12: 01
With the Indians out, sterile: the game is fixed- chickenpox:
Extinct, everyone is going to the planetarium, the widow
Is left over from holding her breath,
And the healthy young carnivores are learning business
With pie chart shooting off middle-class trajectories-
She might be standing under the network-lights
Tentacle the Church, as if she wanted to get hitched-
I see her now whenever I go out,
She permeated the horizon, an unknown chemical element
Fulfilling the atmosphere’s solution: all persevere,
I jogged all night for her, I jogged all night for her,
And now I go through hell: at the end the devil’s windmill
A trifecta of betrayals in his mouth: Judas, Brutus, and Cassius,
Amen- In the seventh concentricity there is a forest of suicides.
If you break a branch, the dead girl’s soul with child
Scream out and escape, spilling something valuable:
On the hills in winter walks Augustus Caesar
Though we must not now hesitate, runaway
For Virgil has a woman’s soft hand, and your pre-Socratic face.
He has told me behind the greatest evil, there is a
Way out. There is a way out, but first down the crimson hall,
The straight track breaching the school, the fast night
Where the children are deciding
Between books and sex, all night the faces swim,
Who they will be with the rest of their lives
Will not be the one they're with:
So their bankrupt parents can't complain
And there is only one way out,
And there is only one way out
Hanging with the wolves on the green
After the football game.