The Self Affected Truant Poem by Robert Rorabeck

They read your poems, because you sit
Out in the food court with them and randy them
With your eyes, like a click of masked avengers
Dreaming of a Pulitzer prize,
As your stuff yourselves with pepperoni pizza
And greasy fries, and the words which go swiftly
Through you and straight to your thighs,

And I have seen something else, while glaring at
You through the rafters of this sun,
For the perpetual lovers are making like in the gladiolas,
And something is blooming, but I cannot tell which one.
For already in the sky and on the concrete humid enough
To take a bath standing up,
There is the building up of a rumble, and a towering of
Cloud, and the principal is getting restless, for he can
Tell from the furtive eyes of the chorus of the greasers
And the misfits, that something is most definitely going
Down,

But just as things start to look good, in the falling of
The gray, I slip out past the baking pots where her soft
Hands are like caterpillars in the clay,
For already there is another land sweeter than in the seats
Of sociology class, and the spittoon trumpets of the marching
Band, where another poetess is beginning a romance with
A marine, I do a tightrope act across the teal canal
Where alligators look up at the souls of my feet as if
I was a nibble god, if I could say what I mean,

And the ample poets now are in their slumber in the food court
Of their souls, their eyes blackened as if by daffodils,
Their teeth chipped like girls from Alaska, their hearts bruised,
And their lungs like broken wings of sparrows shot in unolympian
Games, as around them the bitterness of men breaks out,
And the school begins the tidal hemorrhage of what its all about,
And the underpaid principal with the receding hairline, which he
Can also do nothing about,

But I have little more to say than this, for I do not
Like to preen, though I am justified in the loneliness
Of beauty, the self affected truant muted on the long and rolling green.