Somewhere In Orlando Poem by Robert Rorabeck

O jealousy of cadavers-
Here is another one who cannot taste
The meaning, smiling because he is fully gone:
An addiction of secrets,
They place him with the clock
Above the slender passages they move
The tourists through, metered and dimed:
He laughs down pedantically calling
Out the hours of kerosene lit in his eyes,
Furtively trying come-ons to the bosoms of blonde;
How he would like to undo the abstinent,
Learn about cars;
But he is stuck in the untrustworthy world
Of automatons, and might even be plastic,
But he refuses in his perdition of prohibition,
Mastered by the talking mouse,
The laughing dog;
He gets paid in pieces of eight they scatter like
Windmills in Omaha,
And down the echoing river he can hear the laughing
Scallywags in their murdersome jigs;
But his place is here, amidst the fake mica
And the Styrofoam cave,
And Tommy Sawyer and Huck Finn are cardboard,
And Jim is juked rubber,
And Rebecca is a balloon lying in the white teak of riverboats-
They are serving pizza and little kids fart
And pull the hair of their freckled sisters,
And Orientals are taking photographs;
His cramped bedroom is intestine,
And smells of stale potato chips and sweaty sneakers,
And if he could leap down now and say what he was,
If his jaw wasn’t wired shut,
He’d grab the box of wine and let the vintage
Spiked with earth and Italian pubis cataract his
Ribs, like a tongue on a piano;
If he wasn’t made up, and had a will
Greater than these fools.