The Ones Who Survive Over Me Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Going down into the ditch Indian style:
A hero of the first or second war;
A halo no one will see tonight as I lay immaculate
On my bed by and by with my dogs,
What a perfect purple hearted saint, or suicide
Machine-gunner: It gets pedantic, the staccato tap of
My stunted vocabulary, my rubber bullets
Just bruise her chest, trying to get at her heart:
Insignificant wounds, ineffective bee stings she kills
Away with a shot of any kind, and she’s good to go:
She’s made it all the way to the runway:
She’s taking off directly in the sun, and impossible
To see to comprehend how beautiful she is:
And my body and soul is derivative of the homeless man,
Going down in a clutch of weeds. The one the sorority of
Poisonous snakes licks the ears of, gives kisses to the
Lobes, and then crawls away by the crack of dawn
Their mother-of-pearl bellies showing; or I can see them leaping over so
Many ditches, irrigations and subjunctive easements good
For nimble legged truancies hand in hand in musicals starring
Boys better looking than me, or with sugar-daddies with
Better money: high-healed, the four-legged kind of thief,
And I’ve fallen off the wall she told me she would be
Waiting for me there; and I’m all messed up and the
Knights came, but I still hadn’t a prayer-
So there she goes leaping, a ship out to sea while I’m
Some kind of hero, heartache yet un translated down at the
Curb where the housewives come home at different times very
Near one another with paper bags filled to
The brim with dinner, pressing corrugated cans to their
Nippled breasts with cantaloupes and dry good to feed the
Lips of the ones who survive over me.