By The End Of The Pep Rally's Fortnight Poem by Robert Rorabeck

On some dark valentines,
I molt around the eyes of a pristine high school-
The words give birth to a beautiful cadaver and
We all lay around it on the floor
And let it tell us about the flight plans of a dying
Autumn; and the flies work briskly on my friend,
Though I wish I could say what I want about
It more succinctly;
Instead, while going to the bathroom, I am propositioned
By the venal muse just hopped off her paper
Airplanes, smelling like dead lilacs;
Maybe she supposes I am her grandfather, I have
Been looking so kindly lately- Looking as if I’ve
Been pin striping windmills;
And this is just the gist of it, the way model soldiers
Die in tin meadows bemused by guts of paper streamers
Popping the jubilancy of a Sunday’s fornication;
And I hate to think it has taken me so long to get a job
Of beauty, to feel her punctured breath rise like a swamp
Against my neck again;
And I suppose there are much more beautiful young boys
Fighting fires or getting tattoos in jingoistic regiments
Marching off to the east, but she cannot catch up with them,
Seeing as her umbilical cord is vined to the grave-
So she saw me out at lunch under the craw of moons, and we
Decided to be together and run track, and learn spells
To make a brood of enriched golems; and we rode saw horses,
And she looked pretty once the maggots were picked
From her thrashes, and we watched them metamorphose into
An entire colony of erudite fireworks who were not frightened,
And I don’t know if I’ve said it right,
But it does not matter as their beauty was again dead by the
End of the pep rally’s fortnight.