The Cadence Of The Failing System Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I walk with my mother as the traffic streams,
We make a block around using Military trail
And Haverhill as the parallels of an oblong
Rectangle; We are the only ones playing it straight,
The rest of the world is having a hang-nail;
And the politicians are so right out in the street
Calling out the names of their most prized strippers,
While the pimps herd their pinked ladies in their
Jelloed stilettos out under the Big Dipper:
I once had a class at community college with a
Girl named Tiffany, who was sure that this dirty
Class we perambulate around like the rapids in a
Horrid stream, were raised up to serve her:
She stuffed a freight train of coke up her nose, and
Told the servants more, more, until so calmly they
Laid her beneath a riding lawnmower, until she
Claimed no more: Now it seems to me the traffic
Ripples upon the jawbone of a foreign shore, and
The palm trees sway triangularly like the permuting
Gambits of a guillotine, but I am not sure:
Though Alice maintains something must be eaten
For us to change, perhaps the pills from the medicine
Cabinet will rearrange the poor: But this is no suburbia
In which we take our evening exercise; all the same,
The circulations of dead presidents will pass from
The air-conditioned séances of soccer moms’ SUVs,
And from their wandering husbands’ billfolds’ parlors’
Frictions into the midnight quims of fleshy scissors,
and settle quietly and pressed like name-branded
Gabardine, whatever that is,
Thusly insuring the cadence of the failing system.