Other Mighty Fine Transgressions Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Other Mighty Fine Transgressions



To my sister Christine Carroll who gave us coal in our stockings for Christmas. Who gave me hard-ons both times she road next to me— For getting hit by a car and fired from the pizza joint, for wearing a black dress to see me off on my last day.

To my sister Vanessa, because your name sounds like clothes coming off –For your name which might fit onto the faces of woman I haven’t met, because your neck tastes like the color of wine and sex in rows of fertile ploughed earth.

To Mr. Glenn, the distant cousin to an astronaut and the first cousin to Satan— who made me behave like it was my first year in grammar school, skipping school to scream in the waves the last year of my thesis. For bowling three balls at once and pitting Jesus against Allah. For Men! For Madame ***.

To the young fool I was. To Chris’ father’s liquor cabinet. To the cops who chased me drunk across Wellington. And to my friend Shawn for playing Judas.

To the spirit of the dead Indian who is best laid in unmarked spaces between interstates and coiling byways. For the broken down buses and appliances which don’t work.

To political gangs and powerful families, for your daytime tabloids and easy to handle taxes.

Just as to all America and her red, white, and blue fairytales. To the dresses she puts on at various hours, to become the new identities of madams for different colored men. To the inspiration of the production line, the filigreed cotton gin, daisy-strewn drive-thru’s and minimum-wage deliveries. Just to all that cheap show tattooed on her fine a@s!

This evening, in the higher elevations of the west, in the grand mirrors of glacial lakes where naiads still dare to strip and play nature’s naughty sport above the neon destruction of her pinstriped vest she buttons up to prostitute politicians the twelve months of the red night (the glamour of her elephantine lips) — my solitary prayer, muted through the hillsides lying down to graze, to harass the gallantries more violent than nebular deaths.

Auctioned for all the good children who drive fine vehicles in tin herds under the shear surfaces of multiple suns, for God’s first son and various other mighty-fine transgressions.

- But no more then.

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Robert Rorabeck

Robert Rorabeck

Berrien Springs
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