The Upside And The Downside Of Heaven Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Each line never mentioned in the classroom
Is the one heaven gives a marionette to become real:
A book discovered in the gutter instead of
The library—
A bottle rocket that takes off in the backyard and then
Goes down a hole to make love
To a snake or an amphibian—
When, across the street,
Inside junked cars underneath the planes of talking
Trees,
The newsboys of shadows are selling pornography
To the latchkeys and the truants—
And the silver worlds slip away back and forth
Perpetually—
The zoetrope of another hypnotist’s perfection,
And a few more words thrown out of the gutters of
The mind by the spiders of the fingers—
That reach for the keyboard and then the booze—
While the angels cry like little girls and then like
Wolves in the upside and the downside of
Heaven—
And the castles sleep underneath the clouds
With their kings and queens inside of them.