On Bones Or Tulips Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I prefer to drink,
All alone and all night long,
Slowly like a love letter kindled on the logs,
Like a little girl on a swing set all alone,
Beside the moon and dogs-
Not at bars
Crowded with the lackadaisical society of
Lunch boxes- Girls whose legs are mostly pinked,
Only a strip of pinstripes,
Boys who are boxers, raconteurs, and other
Gay professions I shouldn’t like to spell:
Drink alone is the very essence of life,
The purest confession of any kind, not just
A fieldtrip, a day-drive: This is how the Spartan did
It, his brethren stocked up in the pass,
This is how the mailmen do it off shift, humming
On their slender cinderblock porch in all the rains;
But I shouldn’t drink at all unless I should
Succeed, rack in the monies and fames of spring,
Surpassing my dirt farming forefathers;
Tendonitis of adverbs and similes, instead of
Briary cottons and combines;
Spit-shine, and make my money with a bit of whale
Bone, scrimshawed and rhymed:
Then I should drink! And drink alone! To Hemmingway,
To Bukowski, to Bogey and Macaw:
See me swim so gallantly with the knightly fishes,
Like Twain, corn-cob pipe firmly unclenched, enjoying
The cheapest tobaccos, and of course my cheap liquors:
To make a name for myself, such a talent,
And to go around campus and perform that way, all in
Tweed or gabardine;
mustached, making girls fall in love with my debonair
Intelligences: gentle policemen tip their caps to me,
And we share a nip and parlay- All of that finely fashioned
Dream, and making love to young girls I just met who
Checked me into the library,
My artistic reward, a lap dance in a crackerjack movie,
A long-legged secretary in a brewery makes love to me:
But I should say, I shouldn’t at all, not one dram,
Until I can pay my way, a celebrated libertine,
Celibate of liquor, spiced rum, and sea;
A life of thirsty abstinence, until the funeral parlor,
Or acclaim: Then, on bones or tulips,
With these lips and with these dreams:
Celebrated or forgotten, but at the end of my drive,
I should drink in such a solitary contest
As to line up the alike animals two by two once again in a
Postmodern fire-drill, flood of inundated deluge:
Drink to the girls, the dead poets, the dogs,
On bones or tulips, drink.