The Poltergeist Biding Its Time Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Boats of a long-lipped scar:
I play the housemaid of a truant, I don’t get too far:
When I was a ghost, I made it all the way
To Spain,
But when I died as ghost, living I came back home
Again;
And the city, and the village grew with invention,
And you could hear what they were making all night through
The swift toed streets.
They made those too, and the university, and the halogens
Over the soccer filled stamped with cleats;
And I loved a girl there,
I suppose:
I loved a girl there from the rose bushes no body
Knows;
But I had already died there.
I had already been eaten by the swifter avenues of the petty
Men-
The petty men who got her first and afterwards she wouldn’t
Let me in;
And now I sleep all night alone atop the rooftops of
Ancient high schools.
Like a laughing skull I swig my gin:
And I can almost taste her, taste her, while I kick and
Flutter like a laughing wind vane far beneath the
Swift toed airplanes,
The venal rocket ships, the unequivocally winged devices
She cleans houses in;
And it must be petty of me spending my breathless time
Repeating the abuses that she has forgotten;
But she is just a simple girl biding her time,
While I am the fruit that is really rotten:
I am the poltergeist biding its time inside a boy who is
Forgotten.