The Cadaver O Fickle Regret Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The silence rings- the universe is expanding,
Old girlfriends are getting married,
And well fed: What is truly beautiful now, the alien
Pollens of your high-school garden cannot really
Be touched, just dreamed about:
They are too far away- They are exploding like
Fireworks over forgotten highways;
And this the runny psalm I shook cook up in the morning,
Pretending to look into your eyes, and giving them
Colors of my own; it is like you live in a Paleolithic
Africa, when it was hooked to the north pole with
The earth still cooling on the windowsill of the
Earliest and most beautiful of gods,
And there weren’t no zoos, or Catholic girls who could
Kill with just one dismissive touch, and trailer parks
And palm readers practicing in the dark of suburban
Lakes,
With tampons floating like bloody lilies,
Telling her that I wasn’t her man for infinity, that what I was
Worth must be eaten, strengthened from like penny candy
At the drugstore, the destination of one afternoon’s
Bicycle ride; and the rest of it closeted, entombed with no
Fanfare, tossed to feed the minnows spawning in the
Canal of teal molasses at the a$$ end of a convenient store,
You would later on take updated lovers to, pointing out
The empty tortoise, the cadaver of fickle regret,
Saying to them with your tongue in their ear, there is the
Man I could not abide, though he be better than you,
He could not float in my salt-less sea,
And your tongue dripped the unction of a thousand black-
Eels, which burned like the oil in a drum,
And took you back to the parked cars to finish you off
Yourself like a confection stolen from an out of season fair.