For Want Of Liquor Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The night just spindles for want of liquor,
Like a dream of death one may never become aware
From, the mortal amnesias from a brainstem eaten
Into by encephalitis, like a stemmed vine from which
The heliotrope orbs have fallen:
And I have never been in love, and the fire engine
Rolls by silently, because there is no fire;
But the traffic is busy and making avenues which lead
To so many homes, and in each of those dinner and
Love-making, and wayward children who pray in
Sky blue-pajamas, which are damp from piss in the morning
Before school, and make puddles in their little primary
Colored plastic seats in third grade, or get in fights
In after school daycare playing dodge ball,
When even then the limpid shells of cicadas cling to the
Bark of mottled cypress, not unlike the smell unfaithful
House wives leave for years in their old homes, their cuckolded
Husbands long since gone mad, and ended the pitiful
Spite which clings inside their jaws and horn-rimmed
Eye sockets like the pungent resin in an intolerable tree,
So that they protest by self-immolation out in the finely
Mowed yards of suburbia, out beneath the near perfect sun,
Even as the traffic goes by slow and eddying, even as the kids
Laugh like bullfrogs in the yards, and the mail comes, and the
Afternoon currents flow like warm drapes across the neighborhood,
The flames rippling like cellophane pennants,
Until there is nothing left but an imperfect spot of char,
And maybe one picture from a pocketbook, and when
The skaters come by with their cocky Mohawks, and crooning
For the awareness of the spotlight of their ilk, they are disappointed,
Mistaking the human stain for a place where fireworks were
Shot off when they were not around to see.