The Average Bum Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Going down,
Going down,
Going down and now almost all the way,
They say that this is it,
That we have reached the conclusion and
Soon it will be the morning of the next
Arthur Rimbaud and my dogs,
And fireworks ejaculating into the sky:
Thirty years old,
And I have both of my legs and a space ship
Which doesn’t turn counterclockwise
But sits out in the middle of a fairytale desert
And makes believe,
The strange obsessions of politicians,
And everyone wants to be well suited, a lawyer,
Invested in the pioneers of private larceny:
I loved her too, and swung on the swings
Almost high enough to overlook the condos,
And see down into the great glass-blown
Sea, the mermaids of my stagecraft flowing
Each one a leafy stem,
Each one a name of a girl I met somewhere along
The time frame of the state funded education,
The required love- The long years of it:
Imagining her naked, sandy of the beach,
The little fits of presupposed marriage beating
Her fists,
Because I slipped the stripper with the cesarean
Scar another dollar bill,
The deliveries of blue-collar fairytales,
What I seem to owe to my working class father,
The overcrowded highway stems- The terrapin
Has no will to live,
But lives better than any of us, taking himself
As he does the panthers kill
And the pretty boys get all the pretty stuff;
And I wonder now that its been so many years
Since I lost myself out the window of the predictable
School bus,
When will it be my time again to drink my fill,
To write my bluff, my presupposing obituary-
And to begin to sell myself to the proportions of
Country who have had a hand in my
Product, the splintering trinity of my soul, rippling on the rusted flag
Pole above the rudimentary
Gravestone of the carwash or the cemetery-
I can’t even spell- My ears are ringing from cheap
Rum,
And the state I am in will soon be in foreclosure,
A disquieted sanctuary returned to her crowded bosom,
Misplaced in Saint Louis,
Reinstitutionalized, the average bum,
Who’d pay hourly for any class of paramour- Just so,
Who I am but the drifter who ends his messy lines with
An unwashed kiss,
Before jumping on the train, and finally recipient to
The organized movement, slapping his knees,
Beating his brain.