Like A Crocodile's Reputation Down The Military Trail Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Against the borderline,
I try for her pulse, warmth to my jaundiced cheek;
She is still alive,
But it is so dark from where they are fleeing,
Maybe she isn’t even there;

Maybe she already went away,
And joined the others’ chorus....
Living in his house at the edge.

Probably not,
Already strung out like a kite in power lines;
The material electrocuted,
She hasn’t yet removed herself from the unsuccessful dream,
Lost by the hands which are now weeping
In the mobile home as the rain pellets,
Rusty and corrugated,
And the rabbits scurry;

How can I say that she even is,
Just the open wasteland where her eyes once met
Beneath the foundation of abused toys and sick dogs,
My eyes in the classroom at dusk;
The trigonometry of awful lies,
It meant nothing, not that it ever was....

But property lines of retired patriots,
Rented sex of dusty infestations,
A flag of grout and color blindness,
The fences of rusting locomotion,
Blindness and scurry... In a straight line
All the way out....

Her bus fled through the turnaround before mine,
And went home; Chasing her like a rube,
I never saw her again, for she left this land,
Partook in the cannibalism of the dark mob of
Silenced across the wall.

I wanted fame and her body like a door knob turning,
Everything read for eternity, like a crocodile’s reputation....
Down in the cool tanks of the disabilitated tourism
Of humid refuge, where the egrets sh$t marking white

Sheer silence, but at the core the shrieking of the end,
The cadaverous breathing and then the escape,
The silhouettes inside the holes,
The coffin floating over the power poles;
The sexy levitation of the cheapest mirrors,
The ending shrieks of princesses and nails being pounded in the wooden palms;

This poor who live over there,
In the removed chapters of weedy beauty,
The language which tastes foreign in my mouth;
Her sad but hungry eyes the blindness,
The outline of the darkness that no one can ever see again....