The Funerals Of Average Sorts Poem by Robert Rorabeck

It does no good,
The ebullitions I have meant to accomplish;
It does no good this- this thing-
My soul, a prize in the crackerjacks,
He doesn’t play baseball:
My soul, he doesn’t look to well in
The effluvious destructions,
And mixtures of rainwater and spilled oils,
The guts of Spanish explorers,
The toy trumpets of useless things:
My soul, whoever,
Whipped into a popping jay would say that
The rabbit is dead and hung by the lolling dogs into
The crucifixions of the rock garden,
And there he is, and later on down the potholed
Road, my soul finds fossils in the tire tracks:
My soul was first kissed by a girl down that road
Who wore a retainer-
My soul has stolen, and remembered fantasy lovers
Like little tomboy saints waiting with spears in the aloes,
But it is a silly thing,
Maybe the best mocker of William Carlos Williams,
His pocket full of washers to
Clog up the wiry machines-
Maybe he will, venturing long enough, pot bellied,
Clichéd by the weathers of the well and ready noose,
Find his soul mate, this lover on the bottom of a shoe,
Deep in the wells and drains,
Or he might have to rely on the memories of old news,
Teddy Bears recovered and patched from dumpsters,
Piss stained books on the California gold rush,
A Bret Harte decried by Mark Twain,
Abandoned his country and all of his sweet family,
Removed to the Victorian imaginations of some
New century’s Peter Pan-
Isolated and still born but still managing flight:
Not very well published, like any other mollusk retreating
Into the ostensible beauty of its home
Lives for a little while and then can only be remembered
For the scientific names of hardened calcium:
Conus Literatus,
Or Melon Aethiopicum,
The so many years of misgivings-
The dulled arrowheads and abandoned fathers,
The sad foreclosures, the shutting and locking of doors,
The funerals of average sorts to which
All and my soul must attend.