The Canal Of The Lonely Boyhood Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Stars in the gut, where kittens are in the bag,
Each kind a misspelling not important enough to count:
These are the last things I said,
Sticking up my fingers as she went by on juniper spokes,
Beating the yoke of her just desserts:
She had a family, a bouquet in her amber fists,
A deed to a grave her legs two axels rolling back the
Centuries to high school:
I pulled naked an aspen clear back from the woods;
Like a virgin confluence, a photosynthetic divining-rod:
Would have made a weapon to kill any nymph-like creature:
Took it to her city, wanted to leave an offering of
Pretty fagg*ts where she lay dreaming, an urban prickly-pear
Done up like lucky road kill in the rock garden of
Her pullulating rounds, the dogs howling
With the lawn-man, the fireman, the mailman:
The pool shimmered just as alluring as some other man’s
Bright-haired sister, but
Hers was the grotto of milk, and there was no abstinence:
So I wept something like an apocryphal tourist without
Any swag: And the sky changed color so it could
See too: All twelve apostles playing spin the bottle in
Her room, and she already half deflowered,
Every bottle emptied, creating temporal distortions
And partial nudity. Cumulus rolled
Back in an awful reveal, and they played Easter from the other
End: I fell further south into the distended waves of a homeless
Disorder, forgot to feed myself to keep being real,
Sold so many things until all that was left was exploding in
The sky, the fiery umbrages that fell darkening the sea;
Until, like in a roman holiday, where the alligators audience
In phosphorescent spheres, Queen Anne’s Wheels, silver
Sparklers, they dropped me over into the canal of the lonely
Boyhood, their bicycles whispering against each others’ others.
The soft-shelled tortoise covered me like a stone.
Further north, in the warm concentricity of liquors, under
The eyes of enchanted knights, she laughed as she threw
The dog a bone and closed the pretty door
To this young skeleton who still solicits his love from
A nearby graveyard.