Innocence's Byway Poem by Robert Rorabeck

How innocence wanders the innocuous highway,
How, bearded, he dreams of the thigh he’s
Never touched,
As he sleeps in the weeds like a disposed general
Of a hungry army without any shoes,
Believing in his forthcoming victories, and preserving
How he might end up at her, and take her
By the hand, and by the subtle dissolutions of
Armistice, become sort of a Disney movie with her
Belly distended like a parade balloon,
Little children in a line and hung around the
Doublewide trailer at the mouth of the babysitting
Swamp,
The humid dulcets of the arachnid menageries,
The spider webs breathing in the corners of green rafters,
The nameless dogs chewing on the knobs of corn,
As the light flows like wet paint down the overgrown
Pines and deciduous hardwoods,
Where death is an old creeper who has yet to contain
The shoots of red, or the discarded exoskeletons spiked
Like hidden jewels upon the mossy throats of cypress;
But just as he is saying this to himself,
Mumbling the misspend educations as if scratching an
Itch, the roar of the disinfected traffic wakes him up
Like Niagara Falls, and there amidst the blown intestines
Of the highway’s flared refuge, an orchid makes a show,
The specks of yellow pollen upon the petals belying
The sullied intentions of its virginities of innocence.