Intoxicate Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I drink a little when I write,
To dull the pain and blind the errors,
To give a new shine to the crypt,
And put blue birds in the shadows:
Inebriation lines up the holidays on the fences,
And draws out the kids painted like Indians
In their suburban yards,
Like bottles which glisten and whistle
From their glass canals,
And scatters sun in the pasture-
Fish leap like scaled notes of music,
And footprints change their species in the
Scalding storms arriving on the beaches-
Then, at night, I can easily become a poet of
Middle America- something between the store
Bought saccharine greeting cards for doe eyed mothers,
And the lucid fart from Walt Whitman whistling on
The cartographed prairies;
It is inexcusable tomfoolery, which imbibed in the
Dimness of a parked car, is easily mistaken for genius
By the mouth who spills it,
And the fingers which tap-dance it excreted on
The keys like painful if muted jazz,
But it is rarely if ever cousin to the pink titted scientists,
And those who build their mansions in the nouns
Can rightly say that my home is a dirty studio
Paid for by the month by middlingly lucrative crimes,
For her eyes never stray across me, as if I was
Something she had never seen before
Swimming beautifully through the sea.