Over A Lonely Man's Grave Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Employed by the rioters who tried to blow out
The city,
While the lovers were making love in parked cars
All up and down
The rows of softly planted trees:
Resounding like narcoleptic charioteers, and the amusements
That glowed when nothing else was around:
Dreaming of holding hands with the brown hands of
Alma underneath the
Zoetropes of constellations of roller coasters:
Dreaming of taking her back into the swimming course
And living with her off of cotton candy
And musketeers:
There she was today in the fruit market, not meeting my eye:
Terribly afraid of losing her husband,
But she put a pink rose in my lapel which made the patrona
Angry or jealous;
But I will be gone tomorrow selling Christmas trees:
Gone even before Michael’s birthday:
And Alma just right there where fate placed her: my heart a
Fair ground of manic glee when near her,
Enthralled by the entertainments of her petit midway:
Until she takes her lovely biplanes to fly away- back to Mexico:
Like a butterfly torn from the paper dolls of a lover,
And flung over a lonely man’s grave.