Shooting Star Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Abandoned toys made real for god;
Tonight the heavens are doused with salt,
Which scarred the streets horizontal to the old sea, and palms-
No one is getting published but the greasers,
Who proved their bravado by counting coo on
The winsome coyotes’ dimpled throats-
While the sun was thrumming down the nape of treacle sky:
As soon as I got to school there was a rumble;
And the circus midget fell to stealing gold amidst the mêlée
Of unoccupied wombs,
The brush-stroked cheerleaders of the garish tombs;
The pantaloon cabaret the principle enjoyed at break of dawn.
Then I loved a girl for awhile who was a palindrome;
I became a cleft-lipped Romeo without a date to the prom;
But I serenaded her with crickets from the swamp
Under her desk;
We’d skip school and smoke the hookah in the fata morgana of a bus,
While boys fought outside with bottle rockets and broken glass;
Abating only for the séance of substitutes held at lunch,
And turned the trimmed affluence into a trailer-park
Of dreamers and frog-throat truckers with silver rigs;
While she skipped school and cried in her purple wig:
She whose name I cannot say, for from the very first she walked away,
Until she found another star, a sash for her violet waist
She wore from afar; And signed up for the pilgrimage of handsome conquistadors;
She slipped like a penny beneath the floorboards;
And it is her I am still fumbling for,
My jaw thrown out to sea, a wishing bone, a cenotaph, a fishing-lure,
While the circus midget pick-pockets the trained Labradors;
In fact, she is the shooting star they were all fighting for....