On A Gloomy Wednesday Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Gay-lords are in the apple sauce;
Water brothers brush through the aquatic kelp
As colorfully as a Saturday Morning cartoon:
They share nests as perfect as curious teal.
I read Heinlein’s master work and weep,
So full of scars, and someone has already taken the
Prize from the lucky cereal box, like taking her
Virginity
And letting the cat play with it under the couch
Until it is mauled and penniless
On a gloomy Wednesday;
and on the bright street maybe three girls
Are swishing back and forth in buxom shorts practicing
For the roller derby,
but they will not publish my book,
Because it is not that- Just a hang-up of a nod;
My eyesight is getting worse,
I do not have a hair that isn’t gray;
And she said to me, it would have been better kept in
Dreams,
now come to bed my silky felon: And I can
Do this,
just about anytime now.
I can move out and
Buy my own house with that thatch of green carpet
Good for my son when he gets old enough
to need to
Jack-off. -
And we can pretend to not know of
Such needs,
Good for romance and dime novels and the
Censer the sun swings to
each day hearing the high benedictions
Of vultures and airplanes. This is almost enough:
To recede like this into the waves,
to hold hands with the
Fake species and then to trundle like a washing machine
Blindly with the penultimate mermaid,
her breath burning of
Rum and sugar-cane-
Her eyes smoked in the everglades,
And worked over by black men as sleek as cougars,
her shoulder blade tattooed by the sooty thumbprints of
Triumphant privateers
and wash-tub hooligans. My parents rock the
House upstairs,
and this is how we do it,
go out into the world like
A schoolyard and
watch it flood with the hollering conflagrations
Of waves hallucinating in time, so that entire student body is
Dredged up, and professional streets
With pinstriped angels singing hallelujah,
And the little marks under the eyes,
And the paper-cuts,
The delusions put on stage by busty house-
Wives now glow like somnambulant
Drift wood,
Wavering where the caesuras grow outward in
A thick forest roiling,
Waiting for the sky to boil over, so that the floating cuts
Burn forever like gifts of ignited gasoline,
Each yard like a pillbox on Omaha beach with smiling
Machine gunners and bomb-shell mortar teams
With crystal chandeliers and great tits,
Smiles white enough to sell gifts to a thief.