The Hardest Time Remembering Who I Am Poem by Robert Rorabeck

All your life you’ve lived on Florida Street,
While the better students turned out, shirking your dusty
Roads:
And I gave you orchids the day before yesterday;
And you wore your husband’s ring as you shook my mother’s
Hand:
And you guys stood together like gunfighters, like outstanding
Rebels about ready to take out a star;
And I was all humble, holding your orchid;
And you have four children, and all I want is a chance
To love the tremendous weathers they keep having over the
Catholic universities in Missouri:
And the place has turned out, it really has:
And even the people have stopped dying; and my mother is throwing
Away the trash; and now she is pushing herself.
My mother works a twelve hour day, and then she goes home
To no where and does the books for four hours;
And you don’t know her, but the lions are still roaring in Colorado;
And then I touch myself and make a flume, like a firework’s cone:
Like the lips of Mount Everest:
I push the broom into the sounds of new graveyards;
I clean the streets as simple as a chimney sweep, still believing in
Christmas:
And the nights leap over like fauns: they leap across like good
Cavaliers, like kindergarteners learning in the graveyard:
And then like kindergarteners all asleep and touching themselves:
And my great uncle has speed boats,
And Shakespeare is hyperventilating underneath his lake I ran away to
With Jordan in the early epitaphs of high school;
In the places I don’t remember,
In the places I ran away to, like migrating song birds too contagious
For miners; I’ve loved you in the felt-tipped anthems
Of better suited geodes: In the precious solicitations of lost
Heirlooms, but now I am not good enough to bloom into
The classrooms of professors:
I am all done away with- I am the plagiarism of dark classrooms;
I am dying without the true loves of holocaust,
And it is almost Valentine’s Day, Sharon- My sick muse:
It is almost time for the closing of the shops of winter:
And I wonder how deep the snows have buried you;
And how long I will live after the revolutions of this blue earth and
The amounts of breath in my lifetime:
I keep selling to myself that I am as rich as Shakespeare,
But I have never yet written a play as beautiful as you are;
And you are busy diademing your pinball streets for the next wonderful
Pageantry out in the middle of such wonderful theatre:
While the earth is moving like the penultimate, and grotesquely
Obese ballerina broken free from the still life of her
Aquarium;
And I will finish this again into the séances of my early February;
And tomorrow I might even buy a home,
Even though I still have the hardest time remembering who I am.