Friday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Friday, the sky is falling, the perfect mailman
Over those hills, whistling into another country:
And it is already darkness where she lives,
And in my unstructured poetry where she also lives,
But now she is bothersome because it is Friday night,
And the college is always open-
Students dropout like overripe grapes even with
The hands of busy sun washed immigrants working over
Them, trying to save them in gunnysacks of penitence-
But already, Friday is falling, and the sun is stepping
Away behind the studious hills, and the light is cascading
Like little children laughing and throwing up a lucid
Sheet to let it fall on their unwrinkled faces, like they
Will never do again once they pack their lunch tin and
Step foot on the school bus;
And where I see her, she is hemmed with cypress and
With folly when once I saw her fading as I ran across the
Drainage to skip out of high school math, to sit and fart
And light off pop rockets over the slow green mobiles of
The alligator’s teal and ribboned amphitheatres; There where
The middle-class houses stretched like high mortgage affluence,
Where the Jews and the unwashed goyem finally gathered together
Free of pogroms and ghettos: The clean suited families with
The color televisions and Ataris hooked up in the screened in
Swimming pools, and young daughters helplessly topless in
The glow, and slow drunks, and candy apple adulteries,
And numb divorces, and SUVs, and over all of that my life
Cut in half fifteen years ago there was another Friday going
Down, whistling his song over the Gulf of Mexico, and she
Sat somewhere else just as far away, thinking thoughts I couldn’t
Know, loving who I couldn’t say.