My America Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Enough liquor in me and I am ready
To put down Whitman and go back to school-
Even though I am not ready to spell,
Or look her in the eyes again from across the room
Atop the bleached linoleum plane,
Beneath the flickering halogen sky-
To show her again the love I cannot explain,
Which she has scalped and forgotten like a savage Indian:
Oh well,
I will bore into my studies, my hermitted dreams,
And kiss my professors fully on the lips,
And pick them flowers and buy them perfumes,
And require them to bathe me in my daydreams through
Their lectures....
Though now I am fully gone, and watching Clint Eastwood
Rob banks, and believe I am a true American fully formed,
And even now beginning to bloom in my patriotism
Even though the economy has become homely and shrunken,
Where even pornography is dulled and the eighteen wheelers
Lay parked and quieted along the magestic byways,
Like out of work women, or great out of print tombs,
And they smell like naked French women on soiled satiny sheets
With gun powder and spent cartridges and organs wilted for
All immediacy-
Because she doesn’t read my poems anymore, for she has
Begun to devolve into another amnesiac year full of grinning
Boys, rum, and toy boats which circle her breasts in a convoy
Through her sudsy bathtub;
As the rain speaks, as the clouds tumult and build up like dirty laundry
In the greeny bin of this valley, I can say to her I have not forgotten
The constellation of her shaven legs,
And the dreams like a mother she reproduces in me,
The children I would have if I were a better man, the distinctions
If I were a better poet: but only this now,
A further personification of the proof of this being,
As my careworn dogs runs up to be let in to the better lit warmth,
I down another glass and run off another line,
The protuberance of my unchecked fantasy- I give to her
In the queuing of my tireless youth: For now she is famous,
Full-breasted and marvelous like an expensive dinner,
And the boys about her the jelly of her flavor-
Though she wouldn’t turn her eyes towards me once again
In the sparkling and inebriate light of her graduated ballroom;
This is enough, that I should lay her down this way,
Though in imperfect jest, there is nothing more truthful,
And her areolas display to me the moon in its quarter,
For even though far away, she is still my America,
And eventually she is coming back to me,
Or I to her....