The Rocket That Shot Away Poem by Robert Rorabeck

The world is freezing
On the other side of the moon.
No one sees the silver trees dying
Amidst the little boys.
How many invisible levels must be completed
Before you find her waiting in the secret room?
Up the hidden ladder, which the mathematicians
Had predicted,
But she’s lost her heart
And the way down to the sea. The sky is in
A plastic bag- it can not breathe.
She can only watch you go down
Like an airplane fireballed,
While she masturbates atop the red velvet
Of the curtains you bought her,
Before her mind turned into the golden
Arrow that knocked you off your horse,
And put your breath in the bag with a
Little fish.
And something about all of this reminds you
Of a father, who moved into the gardens
Beside the highway to sleep with a younger
Woman, while your mother staid at home
And roamed the kitchen like a butchered
Banshee, screaming out the window
Across the canal- the crickets and alligators,
And the lions down the street in the zoo
Serenading her as they execute the moon
From the second story
Where nothing remains,
Placing it’s feet in the places where
You remember stepping before you made
Yourself into the rocket that shot away.