Even Though You Say You Are Still A Good Girl Poem by Robert Rorabeck

You don’t care if you hurt me, as long as you stay
Beautiful:
You are like my mother- maybe you live down a ghostly
Street under the manticores of parasitic street lights:
I have watched you hang upside down from them
Showing off your training bra,
Trying to start a fight of little boys, making them lay of
Their paper airplanes and masturbation:
Your eyes are time machines, but you don’t care;
And I just lay out for you in the implausible weather, watching
You playing your plastic trumpets in and out of movie theatres,
With the favorite sweets of your bellicose boys:
And maybe once I wanted to be Shakespeare or the doggerel of
His brother Marlow:
I wanted to take Tamberlaine’s crown and smash in your
Apple-pie halo:
And then I am a black eyed surfer beaten up thorough the angry
Caesuras: the forts of opals and coquinas looming straight over
Me
Filled with their dead memories, and their extinguished candles:
Their copper canons like pews at mass:
They sit forever as the ice-cream melts like your legs,
Like the simple heirlooms you keep in a chest,
While your areolas flagellate moving back and forth in a bed of
Dreams that has been a wonderful ship for so many men
Even though you say you are still a good girl.